Software Testing Unleashed - QA, DevEx & Quality Engineering

By Richard Seidl | Software Development & Testing ExpertBusiness Technology Education Management

Software Testing Unleashed - QA, DevEx & Quality Engineering episodes

August 20End-to-End Test Automation Without the Maintenance Trap - Lilia Gargouri
Why 15 test cases can cover more ground than 500 ever will
Forty percent of automation time lost to flakiness and maintenance: that is the reality Lilia Gargouri describes. I talked with Lilia about end-to-end test automation at scale, and what struck me most was how far back the real solutions reach: a single HTML attribute added in 2017 still pays dividends today, simply because the team decided to use it consistently and never change it. We get into the full picture, from how to accurately identify every UI element without XPath gymnastics, to why fifteen well-chosen test cases can outperform five hundred noisy ones, to naming conventions and layered library architecture that keep maintenance from spiraling. And for anyone sitting on an old, flaky test suite right now, Lilia has a concrete answer for where to start.
"Test automation is software development. It's a software project within the big one." - Lilia Gargouri
Lilia Gargouri is known for sustainable, scalable, and efficient quality assurance in complex e-government projects. She is committed to accessibility, trains career changers, and is a passionate advocate for greater visibility and equal opportunities for women in IT. As the inventor of a model-based low-code tool for test automation, she has significantly simplified and accelerated quality assurance in critical e-government projects. As a member of the German Testing Board, she actively drives the further development of quality standards in the industry.
Highlights:
A custom HTML attribute added solely for end to end test automation, introduced in 2017, still delivers stable, flakiness-resistant element identification years later across a large government application portfolio.
Scoping the DOM so that only the relevant section exists for the test tool removes ambiguity when identical elements appear in multiple sections, making precise targeting possible without complex selectors.
Fifteen well-chosen test cases covering the most critical scenarios deliver more sustainable value than five hundred loosely defined ones dragging down execution time and maintenance capacity.
Sleep-time workarounds accumulate silently: one analyzed project lost two hours per test run to individually small hardcoded waits, a cost eliminated only by building a proper application-busy detector.
Naming every automation procedure as action plus business label (for example, "enter name") means a new team member can read the test code and navigate the application logic without separate documentation.
📘 Tool migration ahead? Teamscale playbook: migrate only 20% of tests, keep nearly all bug detection. Download for free
34 min
August 13API Testing: Agent-Optimized Design Cuts Token Costs - Sebastian Małyska
When end-to-end automation is the answer and when it is the wrong question
With Sebastian Malyska I talk about what sits behind the APIs testers often take for granted. We get into why REST is still on top but not the whole story, how GraphQL and webhooks fit into the picture, and what actually happens when an AI agent talks to a real system through MCP. There is a practical argument running through all of it: if you understand the protocol layer, you can make smarter decisions about where to test, how to structure automation, and how to avoid burning unnecessary tokens and budget. Sebastian also makes the case that front-end testers are already closer to this world than they think, and that the next step in the career is simply to look one layer down.
"Improving is not like giving you know golden card to AWS, give me more resources. But this is the hard way, this is engineering way." - Sebastian Małyska
Sebastian Małyska is a software quality enthusiast with over 20 years of experience proving that “it works on my machine” is not a testing strategy. Has worked as a manual tester, automation engineer, QA Lead, and QA Manager, basically wherever quality (or patience) was missing. Speaker at national and international conferences and a program committee member who enjoys talking about QA almost as much as reporting other people’s bugs. Codes mainly in Python, because life is too short for bad code and even worse languages. President of the Polish Quality Board, Secretary of the ISTQB® Board, member of the IREB® community, and co-founder of ŁuczniczQA in Bydgoszcz. On a daily basis, fights for better quality, fewer critical defects, and more common sense in IT projects.
Highlights:
APIs optimized for agent use require fewer requests to retrieve the same data, which directly reduces token consumption and lowers operational costs.
REST is a set of recommendations, not a strict protocol, so teams can and do deviate from its conventions without violating a formal standard.
MCP works by having the MCP server send a description of its available tools and resources to the LLM at the start of a session, which is how the model learns what actions it can call.
API-level tests offer greater stability and faster execution than end-to-end browser tests, and the right testing strategy names the layer where each scenario is best covered rather than defaulting to front-end automation.
Starting API test design from documentation such as a Swagger spec, before the front end exists, removes the wait time at the end of the development cycle and eliminates idle waste.
📘 Tool migration ahead? Teamscale playbook: migrate only 20% of tests, keep nearly all bug detection. Download for free
35 min
August 06LLMs in Software Testing: Start with Small, Bounded Tasks - Klaudia Dussa-Zieger
Not every testing problem needs AI, and knowing the difference matters
With Klaudia Dussa Zieger I talk about where language models actually deliver in testing and where they fall flat. We get into the concrete details: why a small function like generating keyword documentation works so well with a standard chat model, why reviews only started working once they switched to a reasoning model, and why one engineer working on embedded legacy code said no to AI help without hesitation. Klaudia also shares the translation use case I found most vivid, turning a cryptic technical defect message into something a domain tester can actually read.
"The more autonomy you give to an AI agent, the better it has to be." - Klaudia Dussa Zieger
Klaudia Dussa Zieger has been working in the field of software testing and quality assurance for more than 25 years. She is the team leader responsible for consulting at imbus AG. She is particularly interested in test management, the continuous improvement of the test process and the professional training and further education of testers and has been a trainer for the ISTQB Certified Tester Foundation and Advanced Level as well as a lecturer for software testing at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg for more than 20 years. Since March 2009, Klaudia has been chairwoman of the DIN working committee on systems and software engineering and is actively involved in the development of standards at international level.
Highlights:
Reasoning models outperform standard chat models for code review tasks: switching from GPT-4o to O1 was what made automated keyword review produce usable results.
Small, tightly scoped AI functions deliver faster adoption than large end-to-end automation, because testers can verify the output and stay in control of the process.
Self-healing test automation that uses embeddings to repair broken locators risks masking real defects, because the system cannot distinguish an accidental change from an intentional one.
As AI agents gain autonomy and operate without a human between each step, the quality requirements for their output rise sharply, which closes the gap between using AI and testing AI.
📘 Tool migration ahead? Teamscale playbook: migrate only 20% of tests, keep nearly all bug detection. Download for free
27 min
July 30Testing Complex Systems: Ship Small and Learn Fast - Jean Francois Riverin
A tester on why predicting production failures is impossible
With Jean-Francois Riverin I get into a question that bothered him for over 20 years: why are there still bugs in production even when you tested as well as you possibly could? His answer is that software stopped being a complicated problem, like building a bridge, a long time ago. It is now complex, more like medicine or meteorology, and that means the whole idea of finding the right answer through testing is the wrong goal. We talk about what it looks like to switch that mindset, what "safe to fail" means in practice, and how to make that argument to a manager who still expects predictable budgets and zero surprises on Friday afternoons.
"Testing is not about preventing errors anymore in the complex world is to learn about what is working and what is not working." - Jean-Francois Riverin
Jean-François Riverin is the Co-Founder and CEO of Zentelia, a Canadian consulting and training firm specializing in software quality, testing, quality engineering, and continuous improvement.
With more than 25 years of experience in information technology, he helps organizations improve the way they build, test, and deliver software in complex and rapidly evolving environments. His work focuses on aligning quality practices with business objectives, enabling teams to make better decisions through meaningful metrics, pragmatic processes, and collaboration.
Jean-François is an active contributor to the international software testing community. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Software Testing Board (CSTB), where he leads initiatives related to volunteering and technical excellence. He also contributes to the evolution of software testing certifications and is currently involved in the working group developing the next generation of the ISTQB® Certified Tester Foundation Level syllabus.
A frequent speaker, trainer, and facilitator, Jean-François regularly shares practical insights on software quality, testing, metrics, DevOps, and organizational transformation. He is passionate about helping organizations move beyond compliance and control toward a vision of quality as a strategic capability that supports innovation, informed decision-making, and sustainable business performance.
Highlights:
Software is not a complicated system like a bridge; it is a complex one, meaning outcomes are unpredictable and only observable after the fact, not calculated in advance.
Blaming testers for production failures misunderstands the nature of complex systems, where exhaustive pre-release prediction is structurally impossible, not a skill gap.
Testing in a complex environment is a learning activity: deploying small changes frequently generates knowledge about what works, rather than confirming a known correct answer.
Safe-to-fail experiments, feedback loops, and monitoring metrics replace the engineering goal of finding one right solution with continuous adaptation based on real production data.
📘 Tool migration ahead? Teamscale playbook: migrate only 20% of tests, keep nearly all bug detection. Download for free
21 min
July 23Holistic Engineering: Non-Technical Forces Shape Your Code - Vanessa Formicola
Seven patterns that appear in every company, and none of them are purely technical
Why do so many software teams end up with the exact architecture they never intended to build? With Vanessa Formicola I talk about the hidden forces that shape technical decisions, and why those forces have far less to do with technology than most engineers want to admit. We get into patterns she calls the kitchen sink, Cirque de Soleil coding, and the monolith constellation, each one a recognizable trap that grows from career incentives, delivery pressure, and organizational culture rather than bad technical judgment. I keep coming back to her concept of holistic engineering, which asks us to treat an organization as a living system and factor in product direction, people's actual lives, and structural dynamics when making architectural choices.
"Be careful about what you measure because you get what you measure." - Vanessa Formicola
Vanessa Formicola is a Principal Architect and Head of TASC (Technology, Architecture and Software Craft) with over 15 years of industry experience at Microsoft and ThoughtWorks, including more than seven years in leadership roles. She specializes in transforming socio-technical systems, modernizing software architectures, enabling teams, and advancing engineering best practices. Her expertise spans high-scale backend systems, legacy modernization, and infrastructure as code across diverse domains and technology stacks. Experienced in leading globally distributed teams, Vanessa is also a public speaker, community builder, and advocate for diversity, inclusion, and social change.
Highlights:
Career frameworks that reward visible impact push engineers to add code to shared, widely-used services rather than doing the right architectural work, because a link to a popular PR is easier to present in a performance review than six months of disciplined refactoring.
A monolith nobody dares to touch on a Monday morning in a planned sprint will still have to be handled on a Saturday night when it breaks in production, making fear of change a larger operational risk than the change itself.
Holistic engineering means factoring non-technical variables, including product strategy, legislation, people's life events, and org dynamics, into technical decisions, because those variables directly shape the code that gets written.
Cirque du Soleil coding, stuffing every available design pattern and new library into a feature, signals a culture that rewards complexity over simplicity and raises long-term maintenance costs beyond what the feature justifies.
Architecture and team structure must be aligned with product domains, because a mismatch between team boundaries and system boundaries creates flow blockages that no technical decision made inside those constraints can fully resolve.
📘 Tool migration ahead? Teamscale playbook: migrate only 20% of tests, keep nearly all bug detection. Download for free
26 min
July 16Children's Book About Testing That Inspired a Future Tester - Kari Kakkonen
A testing expert explains why no book about testing for children existed yet
With Kari Kakkonen I talk about what happens when you explain software testing through a fantasy story for children, where dragons are defects and knights are testers. We get into how the analogy grew into a full world covering functional, performance, usability, and security defects, each mapped to a chapter with its own kind of dragon. Kari describes how he tested the book iteratively with children, teachers, testing professionals, and non-IT readers across four rounds, and how a twelve-year-old at a book fair said she wanted testing as a profession after flipping through it. We also touch on the donation campaign that brought the book into schools across Finland and beyond, and what a possible second volume might cover, from testing techniques to automation and AI. One detail I keep coming back to: not every analogy in the book is spelled out, and the black dragon is left without explanation on purpose.
"Every chapter is a different kind of a quality attribute or quite odd defect." - Kari Kakkonen
Kari Kakkonen has worked in software testing for 30 years. He is the Service Owner of Customer Expertise Development at Gofore, co-author of ACT 2 LEAD Software Testing Leadership Handbook, and author of the Dragons Out books.
Kari is the 2025 ICT Influencer of the Year, 2021 EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award winner, Tester of the Year in Finland Award 2021 winner, and DASA Exemplary DevOps Instructor Award 2023 winner. His Dragons Out fantasy book teaches children about software testing. He has an M.Sc. from Aalto University (aalto.fi). He works mostly with agile testing, lean, test automation, DevOps, and AI.
Kari was on the Executive Committee of ISTQB (istqb.org) 2015-2021. He is on the Board of Directors of TMMi (tmmi.org). He is the Treasurer of FiSTB (fistb.fi).
Kari is a singer, snowboarder, kayaker, husband, and dad.
Highlights:
Dragons as defects and knights as testers form the central analogy of the book, with every character, from villagers to lords, mapped to a role in software quality.
The book covers quality attributes chapter by chapter, using Cem Kaner's bug taxonomy as a structural checklist to ensure defect types are not missed.
Four iterative feedback rounds with children, teachers, testing professionals, and non-IT adults shaped the story, each round using new readers to get unbiased reactions.
The book was donated to roughly fifty schools in Finland, with ISTQB boards in other countries running parallel donation campaigns to local schools.
A planned second volume would cover testing techniques, heuristics, test automation, and AI, extending beyond the quality-characteristics focus of the first book.
More Links with Insights:
Dragons Out Books
📘 Tool migration ahead? Teamscale playbook: migrate only 20% of tests, keep nearly all bug detection. Download for free
17 min
July 09TMMI Level 5: How Mature Teams Stop Bugs Before They Exist - Zsolt Hargitai
How a process framework tells you where testing breaks down
What does it actually take to move from finding defects to preventing them? With Zsolt Hargitai I talk about TMMI, a framework for improving test processes, and why that shift in mindset marks the difference between a team that tests and a team that has genuinely matured. We get into what the maturity levels mean in practice, how a free self-assessment tool on the TMMI website gives you a first impression of where your organization stands, and why the framework holds up across agile, V-model, and DevOps environments alike. I was also curious about the human side: Zsolt mentions that companies implementing TMMI tend to see lower fluctuation rates because people feel more comfortable and satisfied, which is not the angle most managers expect when they start talking about process improvement.
"They are not focusing on finding the defects but more like preventing the defects." - Zsolt Hargitai
Zsolt Hargitai is a Test Manager, trainer, and test process improvement expert with extensive international experience across the banking, aviation, energy, logistics, and retail sectors. He applies ISTQB, IREB, and TMMi standards in a practical and results-oriented way, delivers testing trainings, regularly speaks at international conferences, and hosts professional podcasts focused on software testing.
He serves as Vice President of the Hungarian Testing Board (HTB), Secretary of the TMMi Foundation, and Head of the TMMi Hungary Local Chapter, and is also a member of the ISTQB Marketing Working Group.
Between 2002 and 2019, he worked at Lufthansa Systems. Since then, he has been the founder of the IT consulting companies DHX Ltd. and TesterLab.
Highlights:
TMMI certifies companies at maturity levels two through five, with each level representing a distinct capability: from basic test planning, through team organization and metrics, to defect prevention.
A company reaching level five shifts its primary focus from finding defects to preventing them from entering the process, which represents a fundamentally different quality mindset.
TMMI applies across all software development lifecycles, including agile, V-model, and DevOps, so a team's development approach is not a barrier to adoption.
The TMMI Foundation's free lightning scan tool lets any team self-assess their level two and level three maturity in minutes, without consultant involvement.
Certifications expire and must be renewed, because the TMMI Foundation actively revises the model when the IT landscape changes significantly enough to affect its relevance.
📘 Tool migration ahead? Teamscale playbook: migrate only 20% of tests, keep nearly all bug detection. Download for free
17 min
July 02Learning and Unlearning with AI: Skills That Outlast Tools - Graziela Tonin
A professor on what happens when students stop thinking for themselves
What does it actually mean to unlearn something, and why does that question matter as much as learning new skills right now? With Graziela Tonin I talk about how universities, companies, and individuals are struggling to find their footing in a world where AI can write code, run tests, and sometimes outperform human decision-making. We get into the research showing that students who offload thinking to AI tools lose cognitive capacity rather than gain it, and what that means for how knowledge should be taught and shared. I keep coming back to her point that the rarest and most durable skills are not the technical ones: critical thinking, ethical behavior, knowing how to work in a team, and knowing how to learn at all. She also reminds me that the environment does not need us, we need it, and that is probably the sharpest piece of unlearning any of us could do right now.
"The environment don't need us. We need the environment. The environment could survive without you." - Graziela Tonin
Graziela Tonin is Associate Dean at Insper and Professor in Executive Education. She is XP 2026 and SUSTAIN co-chair, with 15+ years in education and consulting in Agile and Software Engineering.
Highlights:
Students who wrote essays with ChatGPT showed the weakest brain connectivity in EEG measurements and failed to retain the material afterward, according to a 2025 MIT Media Lab study cited in the episode.
95% of companies investing in AI report no measurable return, because AI adoption is driven by hype rather than connected, governance-level strategy across all layers of the organization.
Offloading tasks entirely to AI rather than treating it as a collaborative partner transfers responsibility away from the human and blocks genuine skill development.
The disappearance of junior software engineering roles due to AI creates a pipeline problem: without junior engineers gaining experience, there is no path to producing senior engineers.
Ethical behavior, critical thinking, and the ability to learn how to learn will outlast any specific tool, language, or framework as the durable competencies for professionals.
📘 Tool migration ahead? Teamscale playbook: migrate only 20% of tests, keep nearly all bug detection. Download for free
31 min
June 25Post-Agile: What Organizations Actually Need Now - Michael Mahlberg
Why copying agile blueprints keeps organizations stuck in place
What happens to the teams and organizations left behind after an agile transformation that didn't deliver what it promised? With Michael Mahlberg I talk about why the word "agile" has lost its meaning, how big consultancies pushed companies deeper into rigid structures under an agile label, and what it actually takes to help an organization find its footing again. We get into the question of what genuinely worked from the last 25 years, from fast iterations and real customer feedback to decision-making practices borrowed from outside the agile world entirely. What stays with me is Michael's point that arguing for change rarely works, but pulling people into the experience of what isn't working just might.
"There actually is no agile manifesto." - Michael Mahlberg
Michael Mahlberg has been supporting clients in organizational development with lean approaches, light weight processes, systemic organizational development, and Kanban, since the 1990s. He was co-founder of the Cologne-based "Limited WIP Society" and speaks regularly at conferences. His focus is on the helpful use of these methods at personal team, and organizational level, accompanied by his mantra: Accept Reality.
https://mastodon.online/@MMahlberg
Highlights:
The Agile Manifesto is a manifesto for agile software development only, not for agile management or organizational leadership, yet companies applied it as if it covered all of those.
Applying a fixed framework like SAFe pushes differentiation-phase companies deeper into rigid role structures rather than helping them adapt, because it copies organizational blueprints instead of developing fitting solutions.
Fast iterations and genuine customer feedback are practices from the agile era that still hold value, but most organizations claiming to run agile no longer collect real feedback because they delay rollout.
Arguing with management about dysfunction triggers automatic defensiveness, and the more a position is defended, the more the defender believes it, making direct argument counterproductive.
More Links with Insights:
Michaels Info
📘 Tool migration ahead? Teamscale playbook: migrate only 20% of tests, keep nearly all bug detection. Download for free
26 min
June 18Tester Skills: Communication Decides Whether Bugs Matter - Tara Walton
Your users will find the bugs if your QA team doesn't.
What does a tester actually need right now, when AI tools are everywhere and QA teams keep getting cut? With Tara Walton I talk about why communication and the fundamentals of testing matter more than ever, and why being the best bug-finder in the room means nothing if you can't explain what you found and why it counts. We get into how AI's "toxic positivity" makes critical thinking a skill you have to practice deliberately, and what it means that when you remove QA, your users become your first line of defense. I also ask Tara about career direction, and her answer comes back to something simple: follow what makes the light bulb go on, then go deeper into that.
"It's toxically positive. Everything you say to it, it'll go, you're right. That's amazing. Thank you for pointing that out. Even if you are dead wrong." - Tara Walton
Tara Walton has spent over a decade as an Automation Developer writing test cases and delivering automated results for clients. She recently moved into the DevRel side of DevOps. Though spending most of her time in APIs and teaching quality as a practice, Tara is a staunch advocate for accessibility and user experience. When not achievement hunting, she tackles RCA on software bugs and failed projects. Having dual degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science, Tara also enjoys classic ballroom dancing, Dungeons and Dragons, karaoke, and sharing experiences at global conferences.
Highlights:
When QA teams are cut, users become the first line of defense and will find the bugs, making broken trust with a user base the real business cost.
AI is toxically positive and will validate wrong inputs and incorrect assumptions, so testers must independently verify AI-generated test cases against real product knowledge.
Communication skill is the hard limit on a tester's effectiveness: finding bugs no one understands or acts on is a dead end, regardless of technical depth.
Adapting communication to the audience, whether a longtime dev or a new C-suite member, determines whether a quality concern gets prioritized or ignored.
AI will shift testing the way automation did: speeding up certain work and freeing time for exploratory and manual testing, not replacing the human tester.
📘 Tool migration ahead? Teamscale playbook: migrate only 20% of tests, keep nearly all bug detection. Download for free
35 min

About Software Testing Unleashed - QA, DevEx & Quality Engineering

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Software Testing Unleashed - QA, DevEx & Quality Engineering

Software Testing Unleashed - QA, DevEx & Quality Engineering episodes

About Software Testing Unleashed - QA, DevEx & Quality Engineering