Had fun answering these questions for the BrowserStack blog ahead of my talk at break>point in May presenting my talk “To Infinity and Beyond: The Death of Test Engineering”. Hope to see you there!
Q: You’ve spent 25 years leading quality engineering inside some of the world’s biggest financial institutions. What does that work actually look like, and what’s kept it interesting for this long?
A: The work looks exactly the same as anywhere else that builds and deploys software, but I think one of the primary differences is the operational structure and oversight that comes with enterprise technology. When you get into certain types of financial services organisations, the context is just different than other industries because the exposure to regulatory and market moving consequences are higher.
As well, there is a corporate structure you have to deal with when despite not being able to conduct business without technology, it’s not your primary product. So a lot of times you have to navigate business structures and operations that are counterintuitive to running a tech team, but are vital to building and supporting the business.
It can be very stressful at times, but I think that’s one of the things that keeps it interesting and feeling you’ve very connected to global events, politics, etc keep it fresh and current and I’d probably be bored working in any other industry!
Q: Can you give us a sneak peek into your Breakpoint session? What’s the one thing you want every attendee to walk away with?
A: Aside from unloading on the test automation industrial complex for 20+ years of pent up frustration, my talk is a challenge to one of the biggest assumptions in our industry: that test automation means more/better testing and higher quality. I’ll also lay out how the old model of test engineering built on script production, regression sprawl, and maintenance-heavy automation has lost relevance in an AI-driven world.
Hopefully you’ll away with some ideas on how we got here and a clear message: don’t build your future around writing more tests, build it around understanding risk, failure, and system behaviour. The people who stay relevant won’t be the ones producing the most test scripts. They’ll be the ones who can ask better questions, model what matters, detect problems earlier, and explain why systems fail.
Q: What’s a belief you had about AI in testing a year ago that you’ve since changed your mind on?
A: What has changed for me is the full realization of just how powerful the cognitive surrender to AI has been from people I used to respect in this business. I think I underestimated the power of anthropomorphism with GenAI and that it’s pretty much treated like magic. It has created a mania and FOMO that is nothing like I’ve seen before, so my belief that systems thinking, risk management, and oversight could counteract that has been completely changed.
What hasn’t changed it that most of my pessimistic views about AI in testing have pretty much been validated, specifically how bad actors (consultants and vendors) in our industry are cynically just hyping AI as some evolutionary next step for quality. If you’ve been around this business long enough, you see the familiar patterns from people who clearly don’t understand testing, don’t care about testers, or have to live with the consequences of their quality decisions.
To be clear, a testers JOB is to be sceptical about things in order to get an objective view about progress, quality, and most importantly risk. So it’s getting pretty boring listening to the usual suspects drone on about how questioning the value of AI in testing and looking at risk is just being negative or acting like some kind of Luddite.
Q: What are some of the best tech-focused newsletters/blogs/podcasts that you would want to recommend?
A: I’m a pretty heavy consumer of everything testing industry related and am very active on LinkedIn and industry events, but my go to sources for keeping up on the industry is Software Testing Weekly, the Software Testing Round Up by Alan Richardson, the Engineering Quality podcast, and some Google/Reddit alerts I’ve set up.
To keep up with AI and the endless stream of news stories, I keep my inputs limited to trusted sources to focus my attention, and those are: Dagmar Monett, Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Charity Majors, Karen Hao, Fiona Charles, Michael Bolton and Maaike Brinkhof.
I’ve also outlined most of who and what I listen to on a regular basis that has influenced my thinking about my work on my Resources page on my blog: https://qualityremarks.com/resources/ and more specifically for AI here: https://qualityremarks.com/test-automation-days-follow-up/
Q: Outside of the tech world, what’s a hobby or passion you keep coming back to?
A: Well, I spend a lot of time a work so I take every chance I get to hang out with my family and travel. I hiked the South Downs in Surrey last year by myself and it was amazing and I’m hoping to do another one this year in Cornwall.
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