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

January 22Thought Leadership in Testing: Question Outdated Practices - Laveena Ramchandani
Skills over titles and why coaching beats control.
In this episode, I talk with Laveena Ramchandani about thought leadership in testing and the changing role of testers. Laveena sees testers as engineers who lead by example, ask smart questions, and break silos. She coaches teams to share knowledge, speak up, and aim for team goals, not vanity KPIs. We touch hard calls too, like stepping in or reshaping a team when delivery slips. On AI, we agree to use the tools, then add human sense and the feel of quality, like accessibility and emotion. Testing stays very human.
"When you have to make hard decisions for the right decisions, do it." - Laveena Ramchandani
Laveena Ramchandani is a seasoned Test Manager at easyJet with over a decade of hands-on experience in quality assurance, data science testing and digital transformation. She holds a degree in Business Computing from Queen Mary University of London and has built her career bridging the technical and business worlds. As a passionate advocate for inclusive and accessible digital products, Laveena has spoken internationally on topics such as accessibility, AI and data science in testing and scalable automation. She’s also a blogger, trainer and community leader who enjoys demystifying complex testing science and helping new testers find their voice. When she’s not testing code or delivering workshops, you’ll find her diving into the latest data models, tooling, or exploring how teams can build high-quality products that truly meet user needs.
Highlights:
Siloed knowledge is a delivery problem: when team members withhold information or processes, the whole team slows down, regardless of individual expertise.
AI tools can take over test case writing, but human judgment remains necessary to evaluate look, feel, and emotional experience, areas where accessibility testing depends on lived human response.
Coaching testers means asking open-ended questions about what they want from their careers, not directing them toward a predefined path, because career shapes differ and one size does not fit all.
Developers testing their own code introduces bias in the same way AI systems carry bias, and testers bring out-of-the-box thinking that development-focused roles do not replicate.
📘 Tool migration ahead? Teamscale playbook: migrate only 20% of tests, keep nearly all bug detection. Download for free
19 min
January 15Pekka Klärck: Why Robot Framework Has a Generic Core - Pekka Klärck
Inside the Mind of Robot Framework’s Creator
In this episode, I talk with Pekka Klärck about Robot Framework. We start with 2004, his thesis roots, and Nokia Networks turning a prototype into an open source project in 2008. He explains the core idea: a generic engine with reusable libraries, human readable tests, and one set of reports. Best fit in mixed tech stacks. We revisit milestones like the move to plain text, a new parser, and a thriving ecosystem. Pekka previews secret variables in 7.4, a modern user guide, markdown docs, and a cleaner namespace with backward compatibility. He even tests Robot Framework with Robot Framework.
"I'm allowed to say that they are badly designed because I've designed them." - Pekka Klärck
Pekka Klärck is the inventor and lead developer of Robot Framework. He started the project in 2005 as part of his master’s thesis at Helsinki University of Technology (now Aalto University) and has been steering its development ever since.
Pekka is known not only for his technical expertise but also for his dedication to fostering an open-source community. He actively collaborates with contributors worldwide and regularly shares his insights at conferences and events.
Highlights:
Robot Framework's generic core handles parsing, execution, logging, and reporting uniformly, so teams only need to solve the interface-specific problem for their own system.
The ecosystem of editors, libraries, and integrations carries more practical value than the core framework alone, and it grows independently of Pekka Klärck's direct involvement.
Robot Framework fits heterogeneous environments best; for a pure web project where the whole team writes TypeScript, a native tool like Playwright is likely the better choice.
Close to 7,000 Robot Framework test cases are used to test Robot Framework itself, including cases where unit testing tools would technically be the more conventional fit.
The Robot Framework Foundation has over 80 member companies, yet far more companies use the framework without contributing financially, which puts the long-term sustainability of paid core development at risk.
More Links with Insights:
Win a free Ticket for RoboCon 2026
RoboCon 2026 Discount Tickets
📘 Tool migration ahead? Teamscale playbook: migrate only 20% of tests, keep nearly all bug detection. Download for free
32 min
January 08Developer Experience: Testers Shape All Four DORA Metrics - Martijn Goossens
Four DORA metrics, one clear path for QA
In this episode, I talk with Martijn Goossens about DevEx, DORA, and how we put the Q into developer experience. We walk through the four DORA metrics and where testers make real impact with CI, smart coverage, and fast feedback. Martijn shares a simple fix that unlocked speed: give each team a test environment. We explore coaching with small experiments, clear metrics, and regular check ins. Start with the State of DevOps report. Map your QA work to these metrics. Speak value, stay visible, and grow with your team and community.
"If you only rely on very slow UI tests, you can do parallel testing all you want, but it's never going to be as fast without a test environment spinning up then all the unit tests that you could have written and run in that same time." - Martijn Goossens
Martijn Goossens has over 20 years of experience in the QA field. He started as an Agile QA automation engineer and has fulfilled various QA leadership roles for the past 8 years. Martijn is ISTQB and TMAP certified and is a frequent participant in QA meetups and conferences. In recent years he found the international conference stages where he is keen to share his experiences from the trenches.
Highlights:
Change failure rate is the DORA metric most directly tied to QA work, because finding failures before production is the core of what testers do.
A slow or shared test environment blocks all four DORA metrics at once; giving each developer an isolated personal test environment resolves bottlenecks in change lead time, deployment frequency, and mean time to recovery.
Metrics without context are just numbers: an acceptable failure rate or deployment frequency depends on the risk profile and business priorities of the specific company, not on an industry standard.
Introducing changes as low-friction experiments with a fixed review window makes teams willing to try them, because a failed experiment carries no stigma and is simply replaced by the next one.
QA professionals who learn to express their work in DORA terms can make their contribution visible to product owners and business stakeholders who already speak that language.
More Links with Insights:
Martijns Website
📘 Tool migration ahead? Teamscale playbook: migrate only 20% of tests, keep nearly all bug detection. Download for free
25 min
December 25, 2025Testing in 2025: Realism Wins, Accessibility Grows - Florian Fieber
The sweet spot for AI in testing
In this episode, I talk with Florian Fieber about what 2025 taught testers and how to get ready for 2026. AI boosts productivity, it does not replace us. The sweet spot is generation of artifacts like test ideas, cases, scripts, and data. Accessibility grew due to the EU AI act, yet many underestimate the work. A plugin is not enough. You need manual checks and early design. For 2026 we expect agentic AI and a pilot role for testers. AI literacy becomes company wide.
"This year was between dystopia and utopia." - Florian Fieber
Florian Fieber is a senior consultant, product strategist, and recognized expert in software quality assurance with more than 20 years of experience in the field. His work at TestSolutions focuses on test strategy, test process assessment and improvement, and the design of scalable QA operating models across the entire software lifecycle. He is responsible for strategic product management and portfolio development for testing services, as well as for internal upskilling and knowledge management in software testing.
With a background in media informatics and information systems, Florian started his career as a software developer and research assistant before moving into quality assurance. He has co-founded several consulting and training companies and has supported organizations across industries in establishing effective and sustainable testing practices. Since 2022, he has served as President of the German Testing Board, contributing actively to the advancement of professional standards and education in software testing.
Highlights:
AI tools accelerate testing work as a productivity booster, but they require experienced testers who know which problem they are solving, not a replacement for human judgment.
Agentic AI will shift the tester's role toward orchestration: the tester acts as the pilot directing AI agents, not as a co-pilot executing tasks handed down by automation.
Companies routinely underestimate the effort required for comprehensive accessibility testing, because only a portion of checks can be automated and manual testing remains essential.
The EU AI Act's Article 4 demands AI literacy from all employees, making competent and risk-aware use of AI tools a baseline requirement across entire organizations, not just for specialists.
Testing of AI systems is not simply traditional testing applied to a new object: non-deterministic behavior requires different quality assessment approaches, and the higher the risk domain, the more critical rigorous validation becomes.
📘 Tool migration ahead? Teamscale playbook: migrate only 20% of tests, keep nearly all bug detection. Download for free
29 min
December 18, 2025Informal Networks: Trust No Process Can Install - Yuliia Pieskova
How Informal Connections Drive Success in Software Development and Testing
In this episode, I talk with Yuliia Pieskova about informal networks in software teams. We explore how spontaneous ties lift trust, speed, and quality in remote and hybrid setups. Formal charts set limits, people move work through friends. Yuliia shares stories from startups, hackathons, and product discovery where cross team groups watch users, swap ideas, then return with shared context. Remote work exposes old cracks yet levels locations and opens doors for new links.
"Anytime we get to some team, we get to some group of people, we become a part of that informal network and that also influences our behavior." - Yuliia Pieskova
Yuliia Pieskova is the co-founder of Alpha Affinity, a data startup, as well as a Certified Agile and Organizational Coach and consultant with over 13 years of IT experience in operational and leadership roles. She has successfully guided startups through scaling journeys, building distributed international product teams from the ground up, and has collaborated with corporations like SimCorp and SAP on complex transformations and change management initiatives. As a contributor to Agile Alliance and a keynote speaker, Yuliia drives forward-thinking discussions on Agile practices, remote work, and emerging technologies. She also designs and delivers AI workshops and training sessions, empowering leaders and coaches with practical tools to seamlessly integrate AI into their workflows.
Highlights:
Informal networks run parallel to formal org structures and carry more weight in crises because they are built on trust, which formal processes cannot manufacture.
Remote and hybrid work scale existing cultural problems rather than create new ones: teams that already had trust adapted more easily, teams that lacked it struggled harder.
Product discovery improves when people from different backgrounds, including newcomers who carry no product history, learn from user feedback together and then return to their teams already aligned.
Explicit alignment conversations, where team members openly discuss what good collaboration looks and feels like for them, prevent misunderstandings that would otherwise surface as conflict under pressure.
Introverted team members form fewer but often higher-quality relationships, and a well-designed environment such as a hackathon gives them space to connect on their own terms without forced participation.
📘 Tool migration ahead? Teamscale playbook: migrate only 20% of tests, keep nearly all bug detection. Download for free
34 min
December 11, 2025Software Tester Role: AI Assists, Critical Thinking Stays - Tibor Csöndes
From Manual Testing to AI: How the Role of Testers Is Evolving
In this episode, I talk with Tibor Csöndes about how testing grew up and where it goes next. We recorded live at HUSTEF in Budapest, a conference he helped shape. Tibor shares telco roots where automation was normal. Tools change, thinking stays. He sees AI as a third wave after CATG and model based testing. Helpful, not a job thief. Use it, or the testers who do will take your seat. ISTQB gave us a common language across industries. Learn the basics, automation, AI, and the human stuff like clear messages and critical thinking.
"Those testers will take our job who are using AI from those who don't use AI." - Tibor Csöndes
Tibor Csöndes is a highly skilled Hungarian engineer and manager specializing in telecommunication and software testing. He's a veteran at Ericsson Hungary Ltd., R&D, having started his career there in 1997.
He currently works as a Line Manager (since 2009), handling people management and leading various engineering teams in areas like Component Development and MTAS&CSCF. Before his managerial role, he was a Test Architect and Senior Specialist, contributing to the TTCN-3 standardization within ETSI.
Tibor holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME). He remains active in academia as an Honorary Associate Professor at BME, where he supervises students and researches using optimization methods to solve complex testing problems. He's a prominent figure in the industry as the President of the Hungarian Testing Board (ISTQB member board) since 2018. Critically, he is the Head of Organization for the well-known HUSTEF conference, a major identified event in the European software testing community.
Highlights:
Testers who use AI will replace those who do not, but AI itself will not replace testers, because testing theory, architecture decisions, and infrastructure thinking still require human expertise.
The tester role has always demanded learning new tools every decade, from computer-aided test generation to model-based testing to AI, so the ability to learn matters more than mastery of any single tool.
Communication skill is a core tester competency because delivering bad news about a defect requires framing it as a quality finding, not a personal failure or an attack on the team.
A common vocabulary, not any single certification path, is the primary value ISTQB brought to software testing by aligning testers from different industries around shared terms and concepts.
Critical thinking is the one skill AI cannot supply to a tester, and it remains the foundation on which every tool, technique, and automation approach depends.
📘 Tool migration ahead? Teamscale playbook: migrate only 20% of tests, keep nearly all bug detection. Download for free
24 min
December 04, 2025Remote Team Leadership: Report Failures Without Blame - Michał Buczko
Leading Remote Software Testing Teams: Trust, Communication, and AI in Modern Work
In this episode, I talk with Michał Buczko about leading remote teams, trust, and AI. We spoke about clear calendars for open help sessions, regular updates to management by email, and the art of celebrating wins without bragging. We also spoke about sharing failures. That builds trust and can unlock help. Treat AI like a tool on your belt. Use it to amplify testers and developers, not to replace them. Stay critical and ask tech people first.
"In the remote work, if your calendar is free, I can push a meeting inside of it." - Michał Buczko
Michał Buczko is a Senior Quality Management Leader with 20+ years of experience in building and transforming quality organizations. He has a proven track record of developing quality strategies, leading cross-functional teams, and implementing enterprise-wide quality management systems. He spends his free time as a compound archer, explores AI-orchestrated software development, and is building BowSmith.
Highlights:
Hybrid work is still remote work: when team members visit the office on different days, the same remote leadership practices apply without exception.
A team leader's primary job in remote settings is making the team's work visible to management, because the informal kitchen-conversation no longer exists to carry that signal upward.
Communicating failures transparently, without blame, is more effective than reporting successes alone, because it opens the door for management to offer resources and unblock stalled initiatives.
Technical people hold a critical advantage over management when evaluating AI tools, because they can distinguish a genuine capability from a paid wrapper around a public model API.
Encouraging team members to experiment with AI positions them as people who are enhanced by the technology, which is a stronger defense against role reduction than avoiding the topic.
More Links with Insights:
Michałs Blog
📘 Tool migration ahead? Teamscale playbook: migrate only 20% of tests, keep nearly all bug detection. Download for free
22 min
November 27, 2025Test Automation Strategy: Start with the Problem - Péter Földházi
Stop chasing shiny tools. Build test automation that works
In this episode, I talk with Péter Földházi about test automation that solves real problems, not shiny tools. Péter brings two decades in quality and helped write the ISTQB automation syllabi. We ask why to automate, where it fits, and how the test pyramid guides choices across unit, API, and UI. I like how the simple pyramid makes choices visible. He shares a gaming case with 5,000 defects and a velocity drop. Strategy first, then tools, six month steps, and clear value.
"I'm tool agnostic. I don't care what the tool is." - Péter Földházi
Péter was first involved with QA as a beta tester of DOTA in 2006. Since joining EPAM in 2012, he moved towards test automation, and is currently working in the USA as a Quality Architect. He is leading Game Testing Consulting and GenAI Adoption programs in the Americas.
Péter has authored two ISTQB syllabi: Test Automation Engineering & Test Automation Strategy. He also invented two test automation methodologies: the Flow Model Pattern and the Tri-Layer Testing Architecture, the latter published as a white paper by the PNSQC. Péter has been one of the review board members of the HUSTEF since 2015.
Péter is a regular keynote and tutorial speaker on conferences such as STARWEST, STAREAST, and SauceCon. He used to be a guest lecturer at 3 Budapest based universities: Óbuda, Pázmány and the ELTE. Brewing beer and planting chilis are some of his hobbies.
Highlights:
Tool selection only makes sense after the team has defined which problem test automation is meant to solve and what value it should return.
A test automation pyramid visualized as current state versus target state gives non-technical stakeholders a concrete picture of where effort and money should shift.
Testing the same functionality at multiple pyramid levels is not redundant: unit tests assess code quality, while UI tests verify that integrated user journeys work as intended.
The test automation framework (scripts, business logic layer, code libraries) is only one part of the test automation solution; pipeline integration and external system connections are equally part of it.
Without at least one person on the team who already has test automation experience, an adoption effort will either fail or cost far more than planned.
📘 Tool migration ahead? Teamscale playbook: migrate only 20% of tests, keep nearly all bug detection. Download for free
23 min
November 20, 2025Performance Testing vs. Load Testing: Not the Same Thing - Leandro Melendez
How Performance Testing Has Changed: Insights, Challenges, and Best Practices Over 20 Years
In this episode, I talk with Leandro Melendez about how performance testing changed in the last 20 years. Live at HUSTEF, we swap stories from bare metal and heavy browser scripts to APIs, cloud, and Kubernetes. Leandro draws a clear line between performance and load testing. Do not run Black Friday tests every sprint. Watch production, use canaries, and learn from real users. He pushes observability first. Build dashboards, instrument early, and think about cost.
"Performance testing is not the same as load testing." - Leandro Melendez
Leandro is helping everyone to ramp up on their observability, QA and performance practices.
He has over 20 years of experience in IT and over 15 in the performance testing practice where he served multiple S&P500 customers all over the USA, Mexico, Canada, Brazil, India, Austria, etc.
Author of the performance testing blog Señor Performo where he curates a diverse set of learning material for performance testers and engineers together with a couple of YouTube channels in Spanish and English. As well he hosts the PerfBytes español Podcast, and is a co-host on the main PerfBytes show since 2018.
He is an international public speaker participating in multiple conferences, events and webinars, with keynotes, workshops and multiple talks on his belt.
And last, author of The Hitchhikers Guide To Load Testing Projects, a fun walkthrough that will guide you through the phases or levels of an IT load testing project.
Highlights:
Running a load test every sprint makes no sense: continuous releases with small changes call for observability and monitoring, not repeated capacity tests designed for peak events.
Performance testing and load testing are not the same thing; treating them as identical is a habit left over from waterfall projects and bare-metal servers that no longer applies to modern cloud systems.
Elastic cloud infrastructure removes the hard capacity ceiling but creates a cost problem: a system that auto-scales without being tuned can spend far more than necessary while still performing poorly.
AI systems carry a performance cost that is easy to underestimate now because token prices are low, but poorly designed AI integrations with large context windows will become expensive as pricing normalizes.
Observability, meaning agents, telemetry, and a human-readable dashboard, is the starting point for performance work on any project, not the choice of a load-testing tool.
📘 Tool migration ahead? Teamscale playbook: migrate only 20% of tests, keep nearly all bug detection. Download for free
24 min
November 13, 2025Testing Conference HUSTEF: Community Before Profit - Attila Fekete
How HUSTEF Became a Leading International Software Testing Conference
In this episode, I talk with Attila Fekete about HUSTEF 2025 in Budapest. He runs the program and the backstage work. We look at how a small local meet up from 2011 turned into 700 people from many countries. Care for people, high quality talks, and a fun vibe. We discuss new formats like longer talks, a master class track, and a career clinic with coaching and CV tips - and that first time speakers get mentoring too.
"It's not a business for us. It's a love project." - Attila Fekete
Attila Fekete has been passionate about software engineering since the age of 12, when he got his first computer and started programming — and the rest, as they say, is history.
With 27 years of experience in software testing, he has held various roles, including Head of Testing, Technical Test Lead, Quality Manager, Test Automation Engineer, and most recently, Vice President of SDETs.
For a time, Attila was an active public speaker, but during the pandemic he decided to focus his energy on organizing HUSTEF, one of Europe’s leading conferences dedicated to software testing and software quality. This year, he was appointed Program Chair of HUSTEF, a role he considers one of the major highlights of his career.
Outside of software engineering, Attila is passionate about sports — especially swimming and basketball. He also bikes to the office two to three times a week, even when it’s raining.
What’s next? Perhaps a return to public speaking — and new collaborations with other events, whenever time allows.
Highlights:
HUSTEF grew from roughly 150 attendees at its founding in 2011 to 705 tickets sold in 2025, driven by community passion rather than a commercial backer.
Between 40 and 50 percent of the HUSTEF audience is now international, a deliberate shift made after the pandemic to broaden the conference beyond its local Hungarian roots.
About 10 percent of speakers at HUSTEF are first-time speakers, supported by online coaching sessions and slide reviews to break the cycle where lack of experience leads to rejection and rejection prevents gaining experience.
The Career Clinic pairs technical coaching with HR expertise to help testers navigate career progression, including CV optimization for AI-powered screening tools that can drop applications before a human sees them.
More Links with Insights:
HUSTEF 2026 6.-8.10.2026
Hungarian Testing Board on Youtube
📘 Tool migration ahead? Teamscale playbook: migrate only 20% of tests, keep nearly all bug detection. Download for free
18 min

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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