In episode 124 of This Week in Quality, host Ady Stokes kicks off with a birthday celebration for co-host Demi Van Malcot, a quick time-warp reflection on how fast the show has grown, and a week packed with community energy. Demi shares a bumpy “birthday week in quality” that includes a test data crisis, a perfectly-timed article on cognitive load, and the buzz of the Epic Test Quest launch party. Ad highlights the momentum around WIZZO, an AI helper embedded in Slack that’s being shaped by the testing community through real feedback and iteration.

The conversation quickly turns into a lively and honest debate about AI guardrails and the growing sense of “enough already.” Demi talks about struggling to concentrate on audio content, laughing at MoT wordplay, and eyeing chapter meetups as a “meetup tourist.” Ady shares his own packed week, including a Call for Insights conversation with Simon about making “thinking in testing” more visible and an aspirational goal of writing a book, alongside ongoing work on the Software Quality Engineering Certificate and shout-outs to community contributions showing up in newsletters.

From there, the episode leans hard into the AI dilemma. Ad raises the growing public conversation about AI in high-stakes domains like healthcare and online safety, asking what responsibility belongs to platforms versus users. Judy joins with a candid “big sAIgh,” pushing back on pressure to adopt AI tools that require constant supervision and verification, and questioning what “genuine” even means when AI-generated content floods professional spaces. Her rant lands so well it becomes a running theme, affectionately labelled “rainbow vomit,” complete with new community emoji energy.

The stage fills with real-world stories. Christine celebrates Epic Test Quest’s graduation and launch, shares what it took to ship while wrangling AI hallucinations during refactors, and invites the community deeper into building tools by testers for testers. Chris Pratt reflects on how in-person MoT London events became an inflection point for his confidence and involvement, and shares a sponsor update plus a reminder to unregister if you can’t attend so people on the waitlist can join. Shawn adds a skeptical perspective on AI adoption, pointing out the risk of using AI to fill roles nobody in the organisation can properly validate, and reframing the dream as AI reducing burnout rather than replacing human empathy. Nadja shares a behind-the-scenes view from an AI-driven project where she’s effectively “the guardrail,” putting processes and checks in place after months without a tester and watching developers finally prioritise quality thinking.

Across the episode, the group returns to a few sharp ideas: AI might make us more efficient but not more effective, quality folks are often the ones forced to provide the guardrails, and the industry is inventing new vocabulary to describe what’s happening, from hallucinations to confabulation. The result is a funny, messy, and very real community conversation about how to keep standards high when the tools are moving faster than our ability to trust them.

In this Friday 13th episode of This Week in Quality, first-time co-hosts Oleksandr Romanov and Claire Norman lean into the date’s reputation and explore the superstitions that quietly shape how teams test, release, and demo software. Claire opens with a collaboration win, bringing designers and engineers closer together and proving that small invitations can unlock earlier, better involvement. The hosts then share MoT updates, including new Call for Insights conversations with Simon and the newly announced 2026 MoT Ambassadors, before inviting the community to unpack the rituals and “bad luck” rules we all recognise.

The chat lights up with classic beliefs and their origins, from why Friday the 13th became notorious to the evergreen “don’t ship on a Friday” rule. Oleksandr adds a familiar developer-flavoured superstition, “it works on my machine,” and the group discusses how missing information, pattern-seeking, and bias can harden one-off incidents into lasting process rules. They also ask the bigger question: which superstitions are actually useful heuristics, and which ones deserve a gentle challenge with data?

Community voices bring the theme to life. Ady shares a packed week, including recording SQU(e)C content on accessibility and navigating the emotional rollercoaster of briefly being “404 not found” on the ambassador list, plus a reminder that bugs love to disappear the moment you screen share. Gary describes how a Friday release disaster led to a long-lived quality gate checklist, even after the original causes were fixed, while Demi recounts the familiar pain of “cursed demos” where last-minute deploys and restarts sabotage confidence right when it matters most. Then we hear a high-stakes story involving mismatched builds across customer and merchant apps, payment gateway panic, and the hard lesson that transformed their release and sign-off process.

The episode wraps by reframing superstition as psychology. Claire highlights how our bias toward assuming the worst can be useful for testing, but also stressful if left unchecked, and how learning about biases can help teams stay grounded. The result is a lively, relatable conversation that turns Friday 13th energy into practical reflections on risk, rituals, and building calmer release habits.

In this episode of This Week in Quality, Simon welcomes a returning legend to the virtual stage as Deanna comes back from maternity leave and dives straight into everything that’s evolved across the MoTaverse. Together they turn the chat into a rapid-fire “what changed while Deanna was away?” tour, calling out highlights like Into the MoTaverse, My Reports, company pages, thank-you stars and badges, membership updates, SQU(e)C, and the growing momentum behind chapters as the next evolution of local meetups.

The conversation then zooms in on why chapters matter and what becomes possible when in-person events connect directly to MoT profiles, memories, recordings, and the star system. Chris Pratt, a new organiser for MoT London, shares behind-the-scenes insights on stepping into a fresh organising team, raising the bar after a strong year, and what to expect at the next London event. He previews talks that reframe everyday testing work, including one on authentication that treats login as an adversarial system and another on how quality assurance is evolving into quality engineering, plus a call for potential event sponsors to support food and drinks.

Deanna also invites Mat on stage to reflect on community moments he’s enjoyed, including the MoT Christmas quiz, and to share the real-world grind of job hunting in 2026. Mat talks candidly about being asked for “commercial experience” with specific tools, using that pressure as fuel to keep learning, and leaning on the community for momentum. Building on that, Simon encourages professional members to book recorded one-to-one insight conversations that can be published back into the MoTaverse, and hints at future ambassador-led conversations as the programme grows.

Later, Ady Stokes shares an energising update from the Leads chapter, describing an “I Am Remarkable” workshop focused on self-promotion without the cringe. The session helps people push past imposter syndrome, recognise their achievements, and practise saying them out loud. Sean Ye joins from Ottawa with a practical quality win of his own, containerising APIs for on-demand sandbox environments to enable automated integration and regression testing, and using AI tools to navigate dense AWS documentation more effectively.

The episode wraps with a wave of excitement about how fast the platform is evolving, how following and activity feeds help you stay connected, and why showing up, online and in-person, keeps the MoTaverse moving.

#ThisWeekInQuality

#MoTaverse

#Chapters

#Community

#CareerGrowth

#QualityEngineering

In episode 121 of This Week in Quality, co-hosts Simon Holmes and Judy Mosley settle in (coffee vs. missing tea!) and zoom in on how the community is shaping the year ahead through goals, risk thinking, and career growth moments worth celebrating. They highlight the #MyGoals memory-post challenge on ministryoftesting.com (and the Goal Setter badge), reflecting on how different people approach goal-setting and why “showing up” each day can matter more than the end result.

Simon shares updates from the MoTaverse, including the latest releases in the Software Quality Engineering Certificate (SQUEC), especially a set of short, practical audio perspectives on quality culture. A standout theme is framing quality in terms of risks people actually care about, and making consequences visible beyond test cases and requirements. Judy connects this to a real-world “bug surfaced at the worst possible moment” story, fuel for MoT’s Bugs in the Wild learning collection, and the group explores Cassandra Lung’s powerful idea of mapping “circles of consequences” to help teams (and leaders) feel the real impact of “low priority” issues.

The conversation then opens up to the community on stage. Helene shares the pain of repeatedly flagging an issue that only becomes urgent when a deadline hits, and the challenge of being trusted while also being overloaded. Cassandra expands on building buy-in through human impact, “nightmare scenarios,” and deliberate risk decisions, plus a very relatable dose of consumer-side quality frustration while moving apartments. Daria Zion celebrates her first MoT article going live, Five practical ways to use AI as a partner in quality engineering, and shares how she’s improving interview feedback and hiring workflows. Ujjwal Kumar Singh talks performance reviews, experimenting with Playwright tooling, and proposing a move from test reports to a quality narrative, while Simon flags new My Reports features in MyMoT for tracking course progress and community activity. Finally, Demi Van Malcott closes the episode with a brilliant win: an official promotion to Quality Manager, and a reminder that growth often starts by taking on the work before you feel ready.

#ThisWeekInQuality

#MyGoals

#QualityCulture

#Risk

#QualityNarrative

#CareerGrowth

#MoTaverse

In episode 120 of This Week in Quality, co-hosts Eamon Droko and Simon Tomes focus on the power of sharing as a learning strategy, in Eamon’s first time co-hosting the show. They kick off with a look at Eamon’s new Into the MoTaverse episode, touching on themes of showing up, bias and inclusivity in hiring, and the value of talking openly about your day-to-day work. Simon reflects on how speaking and writing in public helps you notice your own progress, and they both champion memory posts on ministryoftesting.com as small, frequent reflections that build a visible learning journey and strengthen your profile.

The conversation then turns to what’s new inside the MoTaverse, especially the launch of chapters as the next evolution of local meetups. Eamon shares his new role as a co-organiser of MoT London, while Simon explains how chapters connect to the MoT star system, making activity a proxy for learning and career growth. Community member Neil Taylor joins the stage to compare old-school one-and-done training courses with MoT’s ongoing community-supported learning, and to explore how long-term testers can move towards quality engineering by identifying and closing gaps over time.

Later, Ayesha Saeed shares her excitement about becoming Accessibility Guild lead at her consultancy, where an accessibility lab and an expanding team are raising awareness across roles, experimenting with AI tools to support audit work, and helping people experience assistive technologies first-hand. Gary Hawkes celebrates completing the A tester’s role in continuous quality course and talks about using memory posts as micro-blogs, pushing for a legacy automation refactor, and the frustrations of accessibility losing priority once contracts change. Throughout, the group returns to a simple idea: start small, find one ally, share one thing you’ve learned, and let the community carry that learning further than you could alone.

#ThisWeekInQuality

#Sharing

#Accessibility

#QualityCommunity

#MoTaverse

In episode 119 of This Week in Quality, co-hosts Demi Van Malcot and Simon Tomes explore the theme of goals and how sharing them in public can spark motivation, support and community. The episode begins with a busy week in quality updates and a look at the Ministry of Testing goals challenge, where people post goals on ministryoftesting.com, tag them with my-goals and earn badges for goal setter, goal netter and goal getter. The chat joins in as Demi and Simon introduce the idea of goal thievery, encouraging listeners to steal useful goals from others and make them their own.

A highlight of the session is a game of Whose goal is that, where real goals from the collection are read aloud and the live audience guesses the author. This brings up goals about getting back on conference stages, contributing more to This Week in Quality and Lean Coffee, writing for MoT and making better use of profiles and memberships. The group also normalise small goals, weekly goals and what Simon calls goal riffing, removing the pressure to set a perfect year-long plan.

Later, community member Ady Stokes joins to share his ambition to make thinking in testing more visible, intentional and teachable, a long-term effort that may grow into a book supported by articles and workshops. Rosie Sherry, CEO of Ministry of Testing, talks about establishing the MoTaverse as a member driven organisation and offering community as a service, including a new Into the MoTaverse podcast. Demi reflects on her own journey from joining a session to co-hosting and speaking at MoT events, reinforcing the message that you do not need to do goals alone. Sharing helps others support you and lets the community lift you up.

#ThisWeekInQuality

#Goals

#GoalThief

#QualityCommunity

#MoTaverse

In episode 118 of This Week in Quality, co-hosts Ben Dowen and Simon Tomes are joined by community members Gary Hawkes, Maithilee Chunduri and Richard Adams for the first live session of 2026. Recorded on Friday 9 January, the episode opens with New Year energy, MoT goals, badges and “fill up your MoT profile” prompts, plus a reminder about the MoT Ambassadors programme and all the ways people can get involved in events this year.

From there, the conversation quickly anchors on a powerful article about AI, testing and getting “back to basics.” The group explore over reliance on AI, shallow understanding and blind spots when tools drive the work instead of human analysis, collaboration and shared understanding. Simon and Ben keep returning to essentials like critical thinking, systems thinking, communication and risk focus, picking up key lines from the article such as “AI is most valuable once humans have already done the thinking” and “AI helps us move faster, but humans still decide where to run and why.”

Across the episode, the panel share real examples of using AI in practice. Ben talks through his Playwright work, using AI powered tooling to add data-test-ids, only to catch a subtle but important mistake later during testing. Richard describes using AI agents with Jira, root cause analysis and Confluence to surface risky areas and guide exploratory testing, highlighting how useful context makes AI genuinely helpful. Gary walks through how his team tried AI coding tools, what happened when the initial push was “faster and cheaper,” and how developers themselves became more cautious and selective over time. Maithilee shares how AI is now a core part of how she learns, stressing the need for clear goals, good prompts and not taking outputs at face value.

Threaded through it all are themes of accountability, risk appetite and the AI quality human loop. The group discuss exploratory testing supported by AI, where tools help with ideas, heuristics and note taking, but humans still own the charters, decisions and debriefs. They return several times to the idea that AI is a tool, not a solution for quality work, and that testers add value when they question, validate and refuse to outsource judgement. By the end of the hour, one message is clear. AI might run fast, but meaningful quality still depends on people who ask good questions, understand context and are willing to stay accountable for the outcomes.

#ThisWeekInQuality

#AIandTesting

#ExploratoryTesting

#HumanInTheLoop

#QualityEngineering

In this special end-of-year recording, This Year in Quality, co-hosts Rosie Sherry and Simon Tomes do something a bit different.

This end-of-year special is live. It’s community-powered. It’s a quiz. The rules are simple. Wrong answers only.

Instead of a polished wrap-up or a neat reflection on the year, Rosie and Simon invite the community to join in and have a bit of fun. Together, they look back on the year through questions, numbers, stats, mascots, stars, badges, meetups, glossary terms, rebrands, and all the small moments that made 2025 what it was.

There are name changes, silly answers, serious pride in what the community has built, and the occasional bug with the platform along the way. Because of course there is.

The episode celebrates what This Year in Quality has become. A space for shared learning, curiosity, experimentation, and showing up as a community. It’s light-hearted, messy, and very on-brand. A reminder that quality is not just about certainty and correctness, but about people thinking together.

A fitting way to wrap up the year and look ahead to what comes next.

#ThisYearInQuality

#SoftwareTesting

#QualityEngineering

#TestingCommunity

#MinistryOfTesting

#TestingPodcast

#QualityCulture

In episode 116 of This Week in Quality, co-hosts Ben Dowen and Demi Van Malcot are joined by Ady Stokes and Judy Mosley for a story-driven conversation about trust, systems, and what happens when reality and “what the computer says” don’t line up. Billed as the penultimate episode of the year, the discussion opens with end-of-year reflections before quickly diving into everyday quality problems.

The episode centres on real-world examples where systems get it wrong. Parcels delivered to the wrong house because the scanner says so, cars confidently reporting incorrect speed limits, and checklists that are followed perfectly while the actual problem sits right in front of you. Ady shares a classic server-room story about power cables and blind checklist following, while Demi reflects on teaching computers through explicit instructions and how easily assumptions creep in when context is missing.

As the conversation develops, the group explore trust in data, AI, and automation. Judy raises questions about people relying on confident but incorrect answers, relationships with chatbots, and how easily we accept what tools tell us without validation. Ben repeatedly brings the discussion back to first principles, sense-making, and the risks of outsourcing thinking to systems that cannot see the wider situation.

Across the episode, the theme is clear. Quality breaks down when we stop questioning, stop validating, and defer to tools simply because they sound certain. Quality shows up when people notice mismatches, challenge assumptions, and ask, “does this actually make sense?” even when the system insists it does.

#ThisWeekInQuality

#TrustAndQuality

#DataQuality

#FirstPrinciples

#QualityThinking

In episode 115 of This Week in Quality, co-hosts Nataliia Burmei and Simon Tomes are joined by Clare Norman and Gary Hawkes for a conversation full of “fizzy minds” and quality problems. The group start by reflecting on end-of-year pressures, learning goals for 2026 and the launch of the new Thanks button in the MoTverse before turning toward the main topic: quality coaching and how people understand it in their day-to-day work.

The discussion centres on situational quality coaching and the idea that there is no cookie-cutter coaching template. Clare talks about working with teams based on their ability and motivation, and how bridge building across roles helps people care about quality when competing priorities make it hard. Gary shares stories from his organisation, where shrinking teams have made shared ownership essential. He describes whole-team exploratory sessions, giving product managers prompts to think about quality and helping developers “zoom out” instead of getting stuck in the weeds of Jira tickets.

Across the episode, the group return to a simple message: you don’t need “quality coach” in your job title to coach. As soon as you step out of your bubble, ask better questions, help teams see the bigger picture or create space for quality conversations, you are already doing the work. It’s about encouraging learning, care and collaboration so teams can tackle their quality problems together.

#QualityCoaching

#QualityEngineering

#TeamCollaboration

#ContinuousImprovement

#QualityAsCare