How plain-English, codeless automation slashes the test-maintenance burden that plagues Selenium teams.

Jonathan Wright talks with automation veteran Paul Grossman and testRigor founder Artem Golubev about writing tests in plain English from an end user's perspective instead of relying on XPaths, CSS selectors, or IDs. They argue that test maintenance, not test creation, is the number-one plague in automation, and that natural-language executable specifications with per-step screenshots dramatically reduce that burden. The discussion covers stability, self-diagnosis via screenshot diffs, three-minute proofs of concept, and bridging test management tools with executable automation. They stress that domain knowledge and the human tester remain essential, and float future directions like RPA, localization testing, and collaboration on visual testing.

**In this episode:**

**Guest:** Paul Grossman — Test Automation Engineer & creator of the Magic Object Model / CandyMapper, Independent  

> “I'm starting to think that tattoo wasn't really the greatest idea, because in this case I don't have to deal with the XPaths, I don't even need to deal with iframes in order to identify these elements.”

🎧 *Subscribe to The QA Lead on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts for conversations on software testing, QA, test automation and the future of quality engineering.*

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Eran Kinsbruner on why mobile apps fail and how to test the real-world digital experience.

Eran Kinsbruner of Perfecto explores the next generation of mobile testing, using PlayStation 5 and Black Friday app crashes as examples of poor mobile performance and coverage. He argues the industry is moving toward micro apps (Android APKs, iOS App Clips, PWAs) that improve UX and are easier to test, and stresses testing on real devices under realistic conditions rather than emulators. Key themes include multi-language and accessibility testing (including foldables), race conditions from other apps and notifications, device and OS fragmentation captured in his mobile index, and onboarding as the biggest UX risk. The discussion widens into shift-right testing, digital twins built from telemetry, chaos engineering, unbreakable pipelines, and AI-driven test-impact analysis to make production monitoring and continuous testing more realistic.

**In this episode:**

**Guest:** Eran Kinsbruner — Chief Evangelist / Author, Perfecto  

> “Either you test for the real world, or you kind of wait and pray for things to work for you, but we know that it usually doesn't work that way.”

🎧 *Subscribe to The QA Lead on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts for conversations on software testing, QA, test automation and the future of quality engineering.*

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A Capgemini engineer on software craftsmanship, mentoring, sharing culture and women in tech.

Sarah Saunders shares her journey from an all-girls school and computer science degree through investment banking into consultancy at Capgemini, where varied client projects gave her a holistic view of technology. She discusses how she got into public speaking, the value of practitioner-led training over quickly-outdated certifications, and Capgemini's internal software craftsmanship course built on pair programming, TDD and the courage to fail safely. A key theme is that a developer's value lies not in writing code but in knowing how to build a product from it, sparked by consultants amazed that techies openly share via open source. She closes with reflections on mentoring, remote-work engagement, gamification, and encouraging women in tech to be confident and ask questions.

**In this episode:**

**Guest:** Sarah Saunders — Software Engineer / Technologist, Capgemini  

> “It isn't the code that we write that has the value. The skills that give us value is knowing how to create a product from that code.”

🎧 *Subscribe to The QA Lead on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts for conversations on software testing, QA, test automation and the future of quality engineering.*

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Two guests make the case for a central model that curates data to make testers proactive.

Wayne Ariola and Tom Pryce of Curiosity Software discuss a vision for an open testing platform built on three concepts: inform, act and automate. They argue testers manage far more complexity than developers and need a central abstracted model or reference diagram to collaborate around, fed by curated data from across the business. The conversation covers moving from projects to products, aligning testing with business value and risk rather than raw test counts, and using shift-left and shift-right data (like APM alerts on an Android issue in Brazil) to make testing proactive. They promote model-based testing and test data automation tools (testmodeler.io, testdataautomation.io) as ways to avoid vendor lock-in and generate tests in any framework.

**In this episode:**

**Guest:** Wayne Ariola — Software quality and DevOps strategist  

> “2021 is the era of data optimization for the tester, meaning we are going to learn how to curate information to make the tester more productive.”

🎧 *Subscribe to The QA Lead on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts for conversations on software testing, QA, test automation and the future of quality engineering.*

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Paul Gerrard argues tools should support testers' thinking, not just automate test execution.

Lifetime achievement award winner Paul Gerrard shares his New Model for Testing, framing testing as a set of thought processes and calling on vendors to build tools that support exploration, analysis and decision-making rather than only test execution. He contends there is no one-size-fits-all method, that waterfall, agile and continuous delivery are all context-dependent, and that we need dynamic, event-driven processes to handle the unexpected. Gerrard emphasizes that everything except thinking is logistics, and that machine learning and AI should help testers build better models of complex systems. The conversation closes on the idea, echoing Weinberg, that all problems are ultimately human problems that the industry keeps trying to solve with technology.

**In this episode:**

**Guest:** Paul Gerrard — Testing consultant and thought leader, Gerrard Consulting  

> “Weinberg said very astutely, all problems are human problems, and we're still as a technology industry trying to solve everything with a technology, and that's where we're going wrong.”

🎧 *Subscribe to The QA Lead on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts for conversations on software testing, QA, test automation and the future of quality engineering.*

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Previewing the Agile 20 Reflect Festival marking 20 years of the Agile Manifesto.

Giles Lindsay joins Jonathan to promote the Agile 20 Reflect Festival, a global celebration of the Agile Manifesto's 20th anniversary featuring over 600 events and a February 12 mega-event with headline speakers. They trace Agile's origins from waterfall and V-model days through Scrum, XP and DSDM to today's focus on business agility. The discussion argues that Agile must move beyond the technology team to encompass finance, marketing and the whole organization, warning against crushing organizations into rigid frameworks. Giles stresses getting leadership inspired, taking everyone on the journey, and treating Agile as an ongoing evolution rather than a one-time transformation.

**In this episode:**

**Guest:** Giles Lindsay — Agile 20 Reflect Festival UK Ambassador / Agile coach, Agility Leadership Network  

> “You don't crush an organization into a particular framework and crush the living daylights out of it. You take the organization and create a nice wrapper that actually works for the organization.”

🎧 *Subscribe to The QA Lead on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts for conversations on software testing, QA, test automation and the future of quality engineering.*

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An Argentinian tester shares her journey from retail to QA leadership and building a testing community.

Ileana Herrera recounts how she stumbled into testing from a retail background, grew into a QA lead and scrum master, and discovered a passion for team building and community. She describes founding Ministry of Testing Salta, running virtual lean-coffee sessions, and speaking at TestBash Netherlands via a scholarship. Much of the conversation focuses on the challenges of remote work during the pandemic, using retrospective games to build psychological safety and get quiet team members to engage. She and Jonathan also discuss neurodiversity, emotional intelligence, and the idea that testers add value beyond just coding skills.

**In this episode:**

**Guest:** Ileana Herrera — QA Lead and Scrum Master, Ministry of Testing Salta  

> “Whenever you go to work, I say, like, why, if you're not waking up and being excited about your job, maybe you have to rethink about what you're doing.”

🎧 *Subscribe to The QA Lead on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts for conversations on software testing, QA, test automation and the future of quality engineering.*

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A gamification expert on player types, co-creation, ethical engagement and building humane apps.

Pete Jenkins, a gamification consultant and university lecturer, explains gamification as stealing the engaging parts of games to change real-world behaviour by applying motivational and psychological theories. He walks through Andrzej Marczewski's player type hexad, the importance of designing player journeys and pre/post experiences, co-creation to drive adoption, and play-testing over heavy build. The discussion turns ethical: the Social Dilemma, data misuse, privacy by design, and why long-term gamification must be voluntary and purpose-driven to work, using examples from Disney, Santander and his own conference apps. They close on gamification for good, digital wellbeing and mixing generalists and specialists to spark innovation.

**In this episode:**

**Guest:** Pete Jenkins — Gamification Consultant & Founder, GAMIFICATION+ / GamiFi  

> “We steal the best bits of games, the stuff that really draws your attention in, and then we see what of that we might be able to use in the real world to change people's behaviors.”

🎧 *Subscribe to The QA Lead on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts for conversations on software testing, QA, test automation and the future of quality engineering.*

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A senior consultant on testing data science models, business intelligence and ethical, explainable AI.

Laveena Ramchandani traces her path from a computer science degree into business intelligence, then automation on the TfL project, and now testing data science and machine learning models. She emphasises collaborating across teams as a quality ambassador, planting seeds so quality ideas grow, and pairing with data scientists to understand what an algorithm achieves and its business value rather than doing the maths herself. She and Jonathon discuss anonymising data sets, testing from the user's perspective, explainable AI and bias, and testers' emerging social and ethical responsibility to ask hard questions. Other themes include shift-right, self-healing systems, offline-capable apps and the value of brave, peer-to-peer learning.

**In this episode:**

**Guest:** Laveena Ramchandani — Senior Test Consultant, Deloitte  

> “Questions are super important. Ask as many as you want. Be the annoying person in the room, it doesn't matter. The more you ask, the more you get.”

🎧 *Subscribe to The QA Lead on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts for conversations on software testing, QA, test automation and the future of quality engineering.*

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A QA automation lead on serverless testing, shift-right, feature flags and proving delivered value.

Lewis Prescott, QA Automation Lead at Cancer Research UK, discusses testing serverless Lambda architectures on a cancer genome project with AstraZeneca, where there are no integration points and everything is code. He contrasts ASOS's approach of using real multi-region users and blue-green deployments as UI tests with high-level UI coverage on a charity budget. The conversation ranges over shift-right testing, feature flags reducing the need for many environments, blurring of dev, ops and QA roles, and configuration-management testing. A key thread is the business 'last mile': continuously validating whether delivered features still add value, illustrated by a gluten-free product line and gamification of fundraising via Strava.

**In this episode:**

**Guest:** Lewis Prescott — QA Automation Lead, Cancer Research UK  

> “We have four or five environments before we get to production, which is just ridiculous. Why do we need all those when we can just deploy to production behind a feature flag?”

🎧 *Subscribe to The QA Lead on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts for conversations on software testing, QA, test automation and the future of quality engineering.*

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