Very happy to announce I’ll be participating in TestBash 2025 through their Leading with Quality day down in Brighton. Hope to see you there!

A one-day educational experience to help business lead with expanding quality engineering and testing practices.

The quality space is evolving. This presents difficult challenges, with it also comes immense opportunity. The world is changing. Technology is becoming more complex. We need to innovate our ways, by exploring together.

What’s more… Our identity as people who care about quality needs love. We are the believers. We understand that quality does not happen on its own. It’s not just about testing or bugs, it’s about the whole system.

We want to help you lead this change. Together, we can find a pathway forward.

Who is leading the day?

To help us explore the challenges of quality engineering we have four good people leading the day.

• Nicola Sedgwick: Quality-focussed leader and avid enthusiast of agile ways of working who loves the way technology can enhance and transform the world around us.
• Ash Hynie:  A technical cultural strategist who propels organizational objectives to better a company’s diversity, inclusion, and belonging practices by enhancing access, equity, and people development programs.
• Barry Ehigiator: A seasoned professional in software development and testing, who is passionate about empowering individuals and teams to deliver quality software products to their clients.
• Keith Klain: Director of Quality Engineering leading software quality, automation, process improvement, risk management, and digital transformation initiatives for retail banking and capital markets clients

Happy to announce I’ll be back at Agile Testing Days this year as a Team Coach!

There are lots on offer, and the first teams that register get a free 45-minute team coaching slot during the conference. So if you find yourself asking questions like:

• How can I ensure that testing has a seat at the management table?
• What is the role of testing in release decisions?
• How do I increase the value of testing?
• How do ethics relate to testing?

…then come find me in Potsdam! Hope to see you there!

File another one under “what could possibly go wrong”. From the article:

“Statewatch says data from people not convicted of any criminal offence will be used as part of the project, including personal information about self-harm and details relating to domestic abuse. Officials strongly deny this, insisting only data about people with at least one criminal conviction has been used.”

It will be interesting to watch the gymnastics to try to get the in compliance with the EU AI Act that comes into force in August. The act specifically deals with safety and potential harm through the risks of AI.

I’ve been friends with Ash Hynie for over 10 years ever since we started hanging out in NYC working in QA engineering and developer advocacy. She has since gone on to greatness through various consulting gigs and heading up the DEI program at Credit Karma to now founding CountrPT, an AI powered career management platform.

Check out our chat about career development, performative DEI, being a good manager, and a lot about how to look out for yourself in today’s job market…enjoy!

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? Timnit Gebru Emily Bender Culture is More Than a Mindset Agile Testing Days Ministry of Testing Angela Davis

A quick message for those struggling with the mudslide of artificial intelligence mania and feeling like they are missing out or question the validity of claims being made by AI fanboys.

It is entirely possible to view AI in software testing critically and not have some form of syndrome the AI fanboy club would suggest is wrong with you. In fact, it is absolutely a requirement of the testing community to look at any claim with scepticism, as IME that is a large part of our job as testers.

Yes, things feel like they are moving very fast right now but I can assure you, no serious person in the software testing industry is dismissing the impact or implications of AI in testing.  And for some practical advice to let you know you’re not crazy, here are some serious folks I am following closely on the frontlines: Dagmar Monett, Timnit Gebru, and Ed Zitron who recently wrote this in his great piece “The Phony Comforts of AI Optimism”:

“Criticism — skepticism — takes a certain degree of bravery, or at least it does so when you make fully-formed arguments.”

It’s getting wild out there, folks! I thought we had some way to go before the AI LinkedIn lunatics completely lost the plot, but I read a post today that left me feeling like John Oliver trying to describe the political climate, “Do you see that? Way up there? Way up there above the clouds? That’s ROCK BOTTOM! And we are currently way down here…”

It’s 2025, and I just had a conversation with a global financial services company where we discussed software testing in terms of <gasp> checking and testing, tacit and explicit knowledge, test automation in testing, and the “Weinberg-ian” (is that thing??) principle of human-centric testing…

Guess what? They loved it and said it put testing and what it can (and cannot do), in a perspective they’ve never had before. Go figure…

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.” – Groucho Marx

A mistake I see a lot of new (and not so new) managers make is worrying about their team members looking for new work or actively/passively interviewing. IME people leave organisations mostly because of bad management (lack of integrity, abuse, no transparency, low trust), but it’s also really hard to know exactly why they are leaving.

Obviously someone actively looking for a new job is a pretty good heuristic that it’s time to review your operation, but it’s not always a bad thing for either you or the person considering leaving.

I have never been threatened by people testing the market or actively looking for new work, in fact I encourage it – here’s why:

This is exactly the type of abuse of untested technology that is virtually impossible to unwind once it’s been deployed.

The knock on effect will be felt in communities and systems far beyond its intended use, because if you think this won’t target the most vulnerable and be expanded well beyond this initial brief, you haven’t been paying attention.

From the article: “The effort — which includes AI-assisted reviews of tens of thousands of student visa holders’ social media accounts — marks a dramatic escalation in the U.S. government’s policing of foreign nationals’ conduct and speech.”

Special thanks to all the AI in testing fanboy enablers who equate critical thinking and valid concerns about safety or harm with being a luddite. This is about to get a lot worse…

A couple of weeks ago on my podcast, I was talking to James Bach and we were discussing the language of testing and what I refer to as “word policing”. Well, I think I might have caused some confusion based on the feedback and comments I’ve been getting, so I wanted to state my view.

To be clear, I think imprecision in the language we use to talk about testing is a BIG problem in our industry, and I am completely aligned on this with James (and the CDT/RST community). Where we might have a potential difference in opinion is WHEN to tackle this problem with clients.