What a week in beautiful Edinburgh for EuroSTAR 2025 – I had a great time with the team from KPMG who sponsored a booth in the Expo for the first time. As in other times in my career, I am so lucky to have passionate testers to work with who care about our craft and community, and the team and EuroStar Conferences was amazing to work with in getting us over the line in time!

The theme this year was “AI on Trial”, and through what I observed and conversations I had over the week, which was an inspired choice as it really feels like we are at an inflection point in the software testing business. René van Veldhuijzen‘s “FOMO Sapiens” could not have been more spot on with the mood right now, as we careen back and forth between “AI-first-all-the-time-bandwagons” and AI skeptics being dismissed with the feverish pitch of tulip speculators!

So what were some of my observations and take aways from the week in Scotland:

• We need skilled testers now more than ever! To put a fine point on it: IMO the AI in Testing crowd seems to be driven by people who have never been testers, never been responsible for software quality, don’t study testing, and don’t give a damn about testers. I personally or anecdotally observed too many “testing is going away” pitches this week from vendors or “consultants” who look at testing as just a spreadsheet exercise. We’ve been here before with the “continuous everything no code” mania, but this tsunami of BS right now hits different.
• The testing industry needs to reclaim is ethical responsibility to call out unverifiable claims, wish thinking, and the just general nonsense that’s getting shot into the atmosphere right now. I don’t know if it should be included in a code of conduct or not, but there has to be a line somewhere that has been crossed when you’re making claims that CANNOT be verified. I’ve never advocated for testing to be the project police, but somewhere in the agilification of everything, testing (and testers) lost their primary role of critical thinking and
• Despite the existential threats to testing, there’s still hope with the folks new to our business. I am fortunate to work with a bunch of young testers at KPMG like Vicky Li, Jess Sarzosa, and Lucy Taylor, but this week I got the opportunity to meet some fantastic testers from Murex. Elissa Tahech gave her first ever conference talk and absolutely killed it – great story telling, funny, and straight to the point. A future star in our industry if she chooses to stick with it…
• Lastly, I had the unexpected and distinct honor of being given the EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award, which is one of the highlights of my career. As I said on the night, software testing is a team sport and any success I’ve had in this business has been down to the incredible people I’ve had the privilege to do this work. I strongly believe in leading teams by meeting people where they are, coaching and mentoring by doing together, and not asking your teams to do things you wouldn’t do yourself. I’ve had the honor of watching teams I’ve lead produce a CTO from UC Berkley, 11 Global Heads of QA, 7 Test Directors, 11 Vice Presidents, 2 Global Product Owners, 2 Heads of Engineering and now a COO from companies all over the world. I hope I am lucky enough to continue to work with such amazing people and teams!

All together we had a lot of un and it was a fantastic week filled with great conversations, reuniting with old friends, and making new ones.

Hope to see you in Oslo next year!