The State of Testing in 2026

What does testing look like in 2026?

In this episode, Tara Walton, Chris Armstrong, Russell Craxford and Dan Billing reflect on the current state of testing, quality engineering and software delivery in a rapidly changing industry.

From the continued rise of AI and changing organisational priorities to evolving job titles, shifting responsibilities and the importance of context, the conversation explores both the opportunities and challenges facing quality professionals today.

Despite ongoing disruption, many of the themes feel familiar. Communication, critical thinking, collaboration, adaptability and understanding customer value remain at the heart of effective testing. The panel discusses how quality professionals can continue to influence decisions, contribute earlier in the development process and help organisations navigate an increasingly complex technology landscape.

Topics discussed

• The impact of AI on software development and testing
• Why quality engineering remains about more than automation
• Communication, influence and stakeholder engagement
• Changing roles and career paths within testing
• Legacy systems, modernisation and organisational change
• The importance of context, adaptability and human judgement
• What the future may hold for testing and quality engineering

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The Call for Papers is open until July 31st, 2026: https://testingpeerscon.com/collaboration/

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Transcript

0:06: Welcome to another episode of the Testing Piers.

0:09: I'm Tara, joined by Daniel Billings, our special guest today.

0:14: Hi there.

0:16: And of course, the wonderful Christopher Armstrong.

0:19: Aloha, and the amazing Russell Craxford.

0:21: Hello.

0:23: And today we are talking about the state of testing in the year of 2026.

0:30: But first, just a little bit of banter from our special guest, Daniel.

0:34: What have you got for us?

0:35: So, a little while ago, I used to have a Twitter handle and it's no longer Twitter, so I I

stopped using X and my Twitter handle was the testdoctor because that was the name of my

business and I chose that name because I'm a massive Doctor Who fan and also I'm a

software tester engineer, which we're going to talk about.

0:55: And today or yesterday I arrived from Amazon, one of my favorite seasons of Doctor

Who, which you can't see at home, but it's season 21 from the original run of the show.

1:06: The final season starring Peter Davidson, which is probably my favorite season of the

entire show because it's got my favorite story in it, which is The caves of Andrew Zani, which

is his final episode as the Doctor, and I'm going to go and sit down and enjoy that later or

later this week or at the weekend, especially if it's going to be wet.

1:24: So all the way from 1984 this box set is.

1:28: So does that mean it's a VHS cassette then?

1:30: Well, I did have some of these stories on VHS back in the day, either recorded off the

telly or purchased because, you know, you could only get them from.

1:40: WH Smith's or occasionally a local Mr.

1:43: Video or whatever your local video shop was, that was what mine was called.

1:47: So yeah, sometimes I got them from there as well, but this is Blu-ray.

1:51: Well, what question have you got for us then, Dan?

1:54: So I'm a big gamer, video gamer, as well as board games as well, and my partner and

I, Tanya, we play a lot of board games at home, so.

2:04: like Azul and Isle of Cats and Joy Pur and Splendor and a bunch of other things, and

we go on frequent dates to our local board game shop which is in the lovely city of Bristol in

the southwest of England.

2:21: And so that that's our thing that we do as a couple, but we also play video games

together either separately or together at the same time.

2:29: So we often play them as a family like Mario Party and things like that with our with

our kids when they're visiting, but I want To ask you, not exclusive to video games, but or

board games, but, but what is your favorite game to play and why?

2:45: There's a lot of games, isn't there?

2:47: I know I'm like flipping through the Rolodex in my head.

2:50: I've been most recently I've been playing Where Winds Meet.

2:54: It is a free open world RPG.

2:58: It's set in, I think, 10th century China, but the graphics on it, the storyline, everything is

just absolutely beautiful for not charging people to play this.

3:07: So that's ranked pretty high.

3:09: Recently, but I think it just might be proximity bias too.

3:13: It's tricky cos there's lots of different contexts.

3:15: I don't want to give lots and lots of answers.3:17: The, the computer game that I've spent the most amount of time in my life playing, not

a series, but an actual individual game, probably would be Mario Kart 64.

3:32: Lots of shouting has happened, but lots of joy.

3:35: Classic, classic version of the Mario Kart series.

3:41: Of course, on the N64 we had the incredible GoldenEye, which just still resonates

even today.

3:49: It does indeed, but, but Mario Kart was the dream.

3:52: Russell.

3:52: So I'm just going back to the game I keep going back to because I've played lots of

games, Call of Duty and all the rest of it, but I always go back to playing one thing, it seems

more than anything else.

4:01: And it's dull, Sudoku, simple, effective, you can do it anywhere.

4:05: It is quite a handy little game, but I find it quite addictive.

4:08: I agree with that one though, I don't think it's dull, but I am a total math nerd, so.

4:13: I can, same problem.

4:16: Numbers excite me.

4:18: I play Sudoku a lot, a lot, and there are some great offline and online versions, so it

doesn't matter whether you're on a commute, stuck on a train in a tunnel like I am quite

frequently going from.

4:29: Bristol to Cardiff for work.

4:31: It's one you can always play by yourself whenever you fancy, it, it doesn't require

much as you say, a pen and paper can do it, or you know you get, you can get offline

versions, online versions, it's a go to one.

4:41: In terms of mobile games, there's quite a few that I play, but one of my favorites is this

one called Alchemy or Little Little Alchemy actually it's called, where you have elements like

wind, fire, rain, Whatever it might be, earth, sky, sun, whatever, and you combine these

things to make new elements or new objects, and some of them are quite weird, obscure,

like you combine lava with steam.

5:13: And it will produce basalt rock or something like that, but then some of them are that's

quite straightforward, and you'll get that.

5:19: Or if you merge two together, you might get something really wild.

5:23: Or if you merge a pistol with a piece of sheet metal, you get a tank, which is kind of

odd, right?

5:30: It's like Minecraft, so the craft.

5:32: table on steroid tape.

5:33: Oh, it's the ultimate puzzle though.

5:35: It's a really simple little game and I play it quite a lot on my phone and you can play it

offline as well, which is awesome.

5:42: So but if we're going down the video game route, probably the obviously you

mentioned Call of Duty.

5:47: I've been playing that for a long time and I used to be in.

5:51: Its predecessor Soldier of Fortune.

5:53: I was in clans for that when I was building PCs back in the early 2000s, but probably

the Hitman series from IO Interactive.

6:02: They're a Danish software engineer, software development house.

6:06: It was originally built by Eos, who created Tomb Raider, I think, but I've put in many

thousands of hours finding creative ways to assassinate people.

6:16: So yeah, it's a lot of fun.6:18: And also if a board game, probably Splendor is a great game where it's a trading

game where you trade gems and collect cards and earn points.

6:31: And it's a game that Tanya and I play together a lot.

6:34: So this week we were going to talk about, was it quality engineering in 2026 or 2026

and testing and the like.

6:41: So I guess who wants to start us off?

6:43: Who sees, I guess, the current state of affairs?

6:45: I know we've predicted the future before.

6:47: But what's people's views of where we are today?

6:50: The world's on fire.

6:52: The world, the world's on fire, yeah.

6:54: But I mean, we're so, so the context for the listener is you, you won't be hearing this

as soon as we're recording because thankfully we have a backlog of things and we don't

have to rush.

7:04: To get these things out, but just last week, listener, we were at the Testing Peers

conference 2026, and there were many great presentations and conversations around

testing and quality engineering this year.

7:19: There's obviously been this little disruptor of AI that's come into our world, but also

there's a lot more systems thinking.

7:26: There's a lot more, trying to improve ourselves, improve our craft, communicate better,

there's a lot of that stuff going on, there were some really interesting tales, loads of different

contexts and perspectives that were shared, and, and I feel like, That, that's a good place to

start.

7:43: I feel like the only thing I would probably just have as my one little bat is if we remove

the AI bit, I still feel like I'm very delighted that we as testers aren't only talking about

automation, regardless of whether that's AI automation or just classic.

8:00: I'm really delighted.

8:01: To that we still talk about the craft being much broader.

8:05: I think you're right there, Chris, because the automation story has been going on for

decades.

8:11: In reality, whilst we get new tools every 5 to 10 years or we come up with a variation

on a theme, so the page object model and other technologies to support automation.

8:22: Whether it's playwright or selenium or what have you, there really isn't an awful lot of

evolution in that space other than the innovations that we build ourselves, and I think the

more interesting conversation is about the communication and the quality of the discussion

that we are having about these topics and how we take them forward.

8:42: Other than the technology is important, but it's not as important as the context and the

conversation that we're having about how we deliver, and that was the thing that I got most

from the conference last week was that conversation, at least from what I was observing and

hearing and paying attention to during the day when I wasn't presenting, so.

9:03: you're right, yeah, AI is important as well, but it's not the be all or end all.

9:07: I think one of the things that really stuck with me from the conversations I've, I've been

having for months now has been.

9:14: You know, we, we all strive to kind of approach quality and testing in more of a holistic

way, because we like being part of the conversation earlier so that we can make things run

smoother down the pipeline.

9:24: But now things are moving so quickly and sometimes in the hands of people that really

probably shouldn't even have their hands in the cookie jar to begin with.9:33: So really forcing that conversation further to the left, making sure we've got all of our

I's dotted and T's crossed before.

9:42: Things just start snowballing out of hand is kind of where I see a lot of the

conversations shifting to and a lot of the efforts shifting to much more preventative than

reactive, which I think is a great thing to finally happen to the testing industry because we've

been preaching it for years and now we kind of have to do it.

10:02: There's a certain element of having to redo what we've done before, like fighting over

the same ground because we've now got this AI revolution that we've talked about.

10:11: people vibe coding, people actually thinking they can build the applications

themselves and do it a lot lower, with a lot lower friction, and they can create the automated

tests and so on and so forth, but actually, To the very point of the conference and everything

else, it's the wider context is missing, the communication, the what ifs, the broader

conceptual ideas, the thinking from a user perspective, and all those angles.

10:34: We've got tools that can help us if we frame things right for them, but actually we're

having to teach a whole new bunch of people.

10:41: So not just software engineers now, but actually AI users rather than just software

engineers about quality, what it means, the holistic view of quality.

10:51: It isn't just, yeah, I can click on this button and we go the happy path, it works

perfectly, yeah, but what about the slightly unhappy path?

10:57: What about real life?

10:59: What about, yeah, you knocked up this prototype in 10 minutes, great with AI.

11:03: But that's not production ready.

11:05: How about resilience, reliability, performance, and you've got this whole thing now

which is driven, I think the communications just funnel has just gone so much wider.

11:15: Sorry, people can't see my visual hand movements there, but he had a good

conversation, yeah, yeah, so it's things just get so much broader.

11:23: We've got to support, coach, advise, assist.

11:28: A much broader set of people now, product managers who think they can do the

building of the application, all these other people, so I think our conversations have grown

exponentially in size, who we need to speak to, how we can influence people, to Tara's point,

but getting earlier in that process.

11:44: We've got to educate a whole new generation of people with different roles, and

we're gonna have to learn different communication skills, different ways of approaching

them, different language that works for them in order to persuade them the value of that

holistic quality approach and thinking about it upfront rather than, oh look, we built this app,

yeah, yeah, yeah, it helped us.

12:04: oh yeah, but we can't scale it, it doesn't work, it only works on the Happy path, it only

does all these things.

12:09: Yeah, it's great, but, and so helping them.

12:13: Understand that's great for maybe a spin up of a startup, an experiment of an idea,

but isn't for something that you maybe want to scale up.

12:20: So those sort of conversations I think are gonna be part of the evolution of how our

world changes.

12:25: There's always gonna be the standard world with big companies building big apps

still.

12:29: I don't think that's dying quickly.

12:31: No, not when we still have people out there coding and things like Haskell and

Cobalt.12:37: Yes, those systems will never die.

12:39: So many mainframes out there, right?

12:41: Still running those things, running old banking applications and pensions and payroll.

12:47: Payment systems are very often ancient, yeah.

12:51: I mean, it brings, brings me to, I mean, my organization that I work for, and I don't

mind mentioning this here, I work for Principality Building Society in Cardiff.

13:01: It's almost 200 years old.

13:03: So we're, we're trying to modernize.

13:06: And create efficiencies and grow more capacity and capability for our customers and

obviously internally as well.

13:14: But it's converging all modern technology alongside a lot of the legacy.

13:20: Infrastructure that, that exists in an organization of that, that size and age, it's quite a

challenge.

13:28: you were mentioning about how the conversations we need to have and the quality

of those conversations and the, Doing stuff earlier.

13:36: I'm just thinking I'm just responding to some of the activity in the industry recently.

13:41: As an ex-Microsofter, I cannot really not mention the fact that their strategy now in a

recent town hall, I think they're not really doing much in that space unless it's AI focused,

and there were rumors that they were going to close a whole bunch of departments like

Xbox and Other things because it wasn't AI driven.

14:01: It's not unique in the industry now, is it?

14:03: The big companies start doing these things and others, others follow.

14:07: I don't know whether that's true or not, but only a week before that, Block, who own a

bunch of companies including Square, and we have colleagues and friends who worked

there or work there who have since had half of their colleagues made redundant because of

the new AI strategy at Block now.

14:26: I don't know exactly what's going on there, but I know of someone who was hired.

14:30: And then let go within a fortnight or a few weeks of joining because of that change in

strategy.

14:35: So it's a crazy time at the moment, I think.

14:39: Obviously we have slightly different employment laws in the UK compared to the

United States where a lot of this is happening.

14:46: And in other countries, but we're not immune to that.

14:49: And every company, every organization that has engineering staff really needs to

think carefully about whether they are going to lose a lot of that talent because they think

that AI is going to solve all their problems.

15:03: And are we the people to caution against that?

15:06: Maybe, maybe not.

15:09: Are we part of that conversation?

15:12: Absolutely, certainly we, we need to put ourselves front and center.

15:15: Or at least be part of that debate.

15:18: I didn't see all the talks last week, but the one that Callum did about how we have

those conversations with our peers in all areas of the business is going to be key, all the way

up to sea level.

15:29: CTOs are going to be key people.

15:31: It's a it's a lot of like framing of expectations.

15:35: And, and communicating value.15:38: Like our friend Vernon talks about, we have to be good salespeople, we have to be

able to speak the language of the folks that we're speaking with.

15:46: if you will indulge me for a quick second, I just want to have a very quick rant about

interactions with our property friends again.

15:55: So those of us that have had the pleasure of working in software for a while have

been able to work and understand different syntaxes, different logic, and different

frameworks, but there's that word logic, you kind of know the flow, how it should look, how it

should feel, right, we've had linters that guide us in the right direction, we have best

practices, we've had all these things.

16:19: It's quite comfortable.

16:21: I know when I write these things, I follow that best practice, all that stuff goes.

16:25: Then I'm suddenly confronted with having to speak in plain English language to

explain to something that isn't conscious yet, to be able to actually understand what I want to

get done.

16:39: I know what it looks like in my head.

16:41: I know what it would have been if I were coding it, but I have to use plain English to

get something done.

16:46: And the way we articulate when we converse isn't always logical, and we all have

different contexts, different interpreters, many, many things live long and prosper down, but

It's, it's tricky, it's difficult, and I find it really hard because even like I've got 2 kids and a wife,

3 other humans in my house, I can give all 3 of them one instruction and get a different

response from the 3 of them, and they're human beings who know me and have lived with

me for a long time and understand those things.

17:20: I've long said any one of us put us in the exact same job, and even if we have the

same qualisophy as each other.

17:28: We would do a different job, we would be drawn to different things, we would be

anchored by different things, we would have different imposter syndromes, we would have

different things that would make us feel better about ourselves.

17:39: And LLM can't be done that way.

17:42: I just, I, I struggle with the time and effort that you have to take to train a model to

understand what it is, cos this isn't just about a context markdown or a memory piece.

17:54: Sure, that is a requirement.

17:56: But being able to articulate exactly what I want without wasting my time showing it

exactly what I want, therefore I've already done it.

18:04: But I have to be anchored towards using it.

18:08: I'm finding that particular part of my life very difficult, and by the way, I can see the

point at which I maybe have trained one and it does kind of an OK job of duplicating me.

18:21: But say for example, the dot com bubble replicates itself, we have the AI bubble

where all the funding ends with AI and suddenly that tool that you were friends with has

Disappeared and you must move on to another.

18:37: That context won't be so easy to move on and train.

18:40: It's just like when you get a new member of staff, except not at all, because it's not a

human being.

18:45: And I'm just angry.

18:47: Not, not just the funding, Chris, you've got the energy involved.

18:50: Oh gosh, yeah, sustainability and energy as well, 100%.

18:54: Yeah.

18:55: If we're piling all this cash into these new tools to help us build stuff faster.19:01: But actually not contemplating the, the mammoth energy costs.

19:05: Well, did you, did you see the, the changes that are happening to Lion City?

19:11: I'd have to appraise me if that.

19:14: Lion City was going to be this incredibly long city, sustainable city, green city with

very little, anything but just being a self-sustained long city, only a couple 100 m in width, but

miles.

19:27: Long and it was going to be mirrored, it's going to be through the middle of the desert

in Saudi Arabia, and there was this really big ambitious project.

19:34: Saudis kind of moving away from being an oil reliant nation and trying to diversify.

19:39: And so they were going down the angle of sustainability.

19:43: Sounds cool, like the project, do all these things.

19:46: I read the other week, the other day, that they're going to change that to basically be

more of a server farm for AI.

19:52: Right, right, yeah.

19:56: It, hm, OK.

19:58: I suppose that'll make them an awful lot of money if they can turn the desert into a

server farm.

20:03: But what about all the, the ecosystem?

20:06: How the, how the, how do you cool that in the middle of a desert?

20:09: How do you cool that?

20:11: It's cold at night in the desert.

20:12: Sure, yeah, that'll, that solves all the problems.

20:15: Well, run them at night, yeah, yeah.

20:18: It's going to be incredible.

20:21: Well, they always use an area the size of whales or the size of 34 football pitches to

describe the size of things.

20:30: But it's still, that's still an incredible amount of area to take up with lines and lines of

concrete bunkers and solar panels in somewhere that doesn't really have a lot of bedrock

anymore.

20:41: Well, how much of the data that they put in these huge server farms is crap data,

right?

20:47: Like one of the things we've always fought against as quality testers.

20:51: This garbage in, garbage out, and so often, anytime I have to deal with one of our

lovely prompty friends, I have to say, where are you getting that?

21:00: Because it's total crap.

21:02: Try again.

21:03: Use these vetted sources, please, and thank you.

21:05: It's just, it's awful.

21:07: And if, especially if you've trained your own model, but you've trained your own

model on crap.

21:13: Oh my gosh, it's so bad.

21:15: I, I usually am using AI to give me a quick example of something that I can do to

remind me how to do something or craft something very quickly so I can solve a very quick

immediate task.

21:30: So today I needed to update some test data in a database table and I couldn't quite

remember the syntax to do it in SQL.

21:38: And then a few like I need to update this.

21:41: This is the table structure.21:43: This is what it looks like.

21:44: And then immediately I had a workable piece of SQL that I could use, which I then

tweaked and adapted to update the other rest of the data that I needed.

21:53: So it was just a 32nd query, not garbage going in, but it gave me something very

helpful coming out.

22:00: But I knew exactly what I wanted.

22:02: So I wasn't going to be getting crap out when I first started looking at this, I was

getting a lot of GIGO because the tools would just run away with the concepts that I was

trying to, so I started putting in things like saying don't actually execute anything until I've

decided that's what I want, reviewing what you've produced while it's produced, because it

was not structuring things very well, wasn't very readable to a human being.

22:30: And it was too verbose and largely not following the patterns that we wanted to follow

as an engineering team.

22:38: I was just exploring and learning with it.

22:39: It wasn't going to ever become production code, but it was just too noisy, you know.

22:44: Now I'm much more comfortable with creating prompts that I might need to use to

build, let's say, a simple task for an automation test would be building a page object model

and getting the right level of quality in the locators to help identify something on a page.

23:00: That's something Playwright does very well, and it has tools to help you do that, but

they need help because This is something I was talking about in my workshop is that whilst

the tools are there and they're great and they're interesting and exciting, they create brittle

tests and very noddy vanilla test plans, so it still needs a human being to really provide the

level of context we need to solve the problems that we have for our organizations.

23:27: Just using it out of the box is not appropriate in any way, shape or form, at least in

my experience.

23:33: So Chris started us off this episode saying not talking about AI and we've gone down

the rabbit hole of talking about AI.

23:42: So in the 2026, I guess the year that we're currently on, AI is a big part of it.

23:48: We can't pretend it's not, I think it's fair to say.

23:50: Thus we talk about it now.

23:53: We talk about people, context being kind of a good thing and a thing that we need to

focus on a little bit more.

23:58: But what's the sort of the other trends, you know, like.

24:03: Jobs, work, progression, thinking about broader pictures of people and what people

can achieve these days, have they radically shifted?

24:12: Are they similar to what they have been?

24:14: So our, our dear friends at Practest, they just put out the state of testing for 2026.

24:22: And if you haven't gone through and read it yet, it's a lot of it is things you would have

guessed, but there were a couple of things that really stood out for me, and one of them was

this idea of all or nothing.

24:33: So companies are either choosing to do all of their testing in-house or outsource

everything, right?

24:39: There's no middle ground, there's no shared responsibilities, and I know that I always

fear that loss of context, and then Kind of having to bring on people with no idea about what

your company values and what your product is meant to do and how your customers react to

things when all of that testing lives outside of your bubble.

25:01: So that trend was a little, little more shocking to me.

25:04: I thought we would have kind of learned by now that that's Not the greatest solution.25:09: It's, it's remarkable, isn't it, how many things that we've been debating for the last

1015 years still persist and still come back.

25:17: But one of those themes and trends that we see is also, You know, the

communication and the social aspects of things, while that is now different and perhaps our

first social point might be an LLM, actually the folks that we interact with on a regular basis

likely aren't just other testers or developers anymore.

25:43: I think the dynamics of teams have changed a lot as time has gone by, and that's not

just as folks have been in the industry longer and they, they sort of work their way up some

sort of fictitious, Career ladder, we do just spend time with more product people, design

people, other job roles that exist.

26:05: Like you spend a lot of time with people talking about things that are important to us

and to them.

26:12: I feel like we have a much more diverse mix as a result of that and.

26:16: I remember the keynote that Isabel Evans did at Eurostar last year where she said

actually the spread of individuals that need to be around and participant in order for quality

engineering to be successful is going to need to come from a much broader pool of

individuals than maybe historically was more of a compsci kind of background.

26:43: And I think she's right, I think we do need, More diversity in thought and practice to

better represent these things, does that mean there are fewer of that one kind of thing that

we used to do?

26:55: Probably, but that does mean there will be a lot of other new things as well, right?

26:59: Just looking at a list of jobs on LinkedIn that are test related, it's all engineering

focused roles, very few analyst or tester labels.

27:11: You still see them, they're much, much fewer.

27:15: But we're looking at areas of quality which we might not have had before, so site

reliability comes up a lot, Platform quality comes up a lot.

27:28: Even you still see SSE occasionally, but it's normally software engineer.

27:34: With a testing focus or something like that, you don't normally just get software tester

because talking about that broader context about the conversations that we're having.

27:44: Something that Callum was saying is that the negativity that we breed sometimes

through the way that we interact with others, whether it's the context of the conversations or

the tone of those conversations or the breadth and depth of those conversations, to

confining them to just test topics often creates a Negative feedback loop with colleagues,

certainly with senior people.

28:08: and the question I asked Callum about it is like, you know, I think we were having

similar conversations 10+ years ago, but now it's moved on, evolved.

28:17: That conversation that I remember having a test bash where Martin Hier did a talk

about what what happened if we renamed the testers to be something else like agile

consultants or something like that and what that impact had on getting more engagement

with the people that were test specialists by calling them something different.

28:41: And also Keith Klain was talking in, I think it might have been the same event, might

have been in the year previous.

28:46: was talking about how we need to talk more robustly but smartly with senior people

about testing and quality because it's not necessarily interesting to them.

28:57: They only care when it's affecting the bottom line at the moment, so too many tests,

too many testers, or Not enough impact customer impact, customer value that we've

mentioned value a lot, but not only value to the business, but value to the customer to

improving the engineering as a whole.29:18: I think we still have a lot to do to improve that relationship.

29:23: I think when I first started being a tester, and this was 25 years ago, I was often very

defensive because I think I came in without any computer science background.

29:34: Some of the developers that I worked with were not friendly towards me or other

testers in the team, of which there were 2 or 3.

29:42: They didn't really understand why we were there, or we were seen sort of as sort of

dogs' bodies, kind of.

29:47: That's how it felt.

29:49: It's like we were sort of second class, if you see what I mean.

29:53: But I got on much better with my counterparts in the American team that I worked in

because they took the quality and testing conversation a lot more seriously, I think, and that

came from their attitude towards skilling people up across all domains.

30:11: So I learned a lot more from the engineers in the American teams I worked with.

30:16: This was in at AOL.

30:18: It was the first business I worked for.

30:21: And the teams in Jacksonville and in Virginia that I worked with were really switched

on, and as soon as they came online at about sort of 1112 o'clock our time, maybe a little bit

later.

30:35: I was online with them immediately getting, asking questions and getting tips and

heads up on things that were happening because that just wasn't coming to me from the

engineers that were in my org in Bristol.

30:47: The positioning piece is really interesting, isn't it, though?

30:49: I think broadly speaking, I observed that testers have got a better position, respect,

but to Callum's point, Often we end up shooting ourselves in the foot.

31:01: Agreed, yeah.

31:02: Poisoning the well, I think was the, the, the terminology and, and, and maybe there's

a, a bit of echo chamber, maybe there's a little bit of what Linda said in our International

Women's Day episode, the whole crab bucket where somebody's making success and we

end up pulling them down rather than lifting them up.

31:20: And oftentimes testing is always just kind of anchored with this kind of victim

mindset.

31:26: We are a cost, not an accelerator, yada yada yada.

31:29: But to Dan's point with his colleagues, even 25 years ago, there's another way,

there's other ways to, to look at things through the lens of improvement, through the lens of

opportunity for.

31:41: That respect isn't, isn't something you can demand, but you can earn it through good

actions, through positive actions, through building people up, through, through repeatedly

delivering work and things, and through the thread a lot of what we've talked about already,

it's, it's about being, Proactive.

31:59: Being preventative, doing a lot of that sort of good long stretch and, You know, I was

thinking of Philippa's talk at at Pierce Colle where she said, you know, maybe they're still our

gates, but they've moved.

32:14: Maybe it's not just one person anymore, but there's still what maybe we'd refer to as

necessary friction that goes through our pipelines, and the industry is fluid, it's very wildly

different.

32:24: I've had over 30 words in my job titles in this industry.

32:28: Like it's, there's many, many different things, and yes, there was the universality of

quality as a common thread, but it's a patchwork.32:35: There's an awful lot of different things that go on and, and possibly the industry is

more disparate now than it's ever been.

32:42: And yet, you know, we're in this globalized world where everything is at our fingertips

and we have access to so many things and yet, everybody is doing everything incredibly

differently, and it's only getting more amplified.

32:53: I know that there's been, An overwhelming amount of anxiety and concern about kind

of the future of QA as we faced this AI and the the business redundancies and corporate

greed and all of the things that come around in a secular moment.

33:15: To kind of pull QA up or down as the winds, as the winds may carry us.

33:21: So it, it is a little scary out there right now, but I think one of the things that has

popped up more and more is that I keep hearing people talk about going back to basics, and

some of the things that we talked about when when Agile first came on the scene of, well,

let's be part of the conversation earlier and where can I help.

33:42: And Chris's favorite question, but why?

33:45: Why are we doing that?

33:48: and all of those things that are just consistent even when the rest of the world is

flipping around and doesn't know what it's doing.

33:56: I feel like we're still really consistent in our goals and, and kind of the driving force

behind the things that testers and, and quality engineers are aiming for.

34:06: I don't think that'll go away anytime soon.

34:08: I think you're right, I think the world we're in is very disparate, and it's not gonna get

narrower.

34:13: AI is going to do the opposite probably in many ways.

34:16: We talked about old banking systems before at the very start, I think.

34:20: These things still exist, they haven't been end of life.

34:22: How much things do we create that never end dying?

34:26: So the more we create, you often the more we have to support, the more

complicated the world is.

34:31: I know I've got banking systems and payment systems where I work where, you

know, we're talking 20 year old systems.

34:36: The technologies and things like that, no one's really trying to develop the future to

support the ancient.

34:42: I'll call it 20 years is not ancient, but you know, in computer terms it is.

34:46: So the world that we work in, the ways in which we work, they're not gonna die

overnight.

34:52: They're gonna evolve and that's exactly what it is, evolution, not revolution.

34:56: Because some of the things we've got can't die, can't change.

35:00: There'll be a big business driver to radicalize the change that we're doing, there'll be

startups that completely do it from a different angle.

35:07: That's cool.

35:08: But actually there'll be pivots of companies.

35:11: You know, how long did some companies take to get a shop, for example, a website

for selling their products online?

35:17: Took a long time.

35:18: So as much as we talk about the world changing, it is changing and it is changing

fast.

35:23: There is still.35:24: Pocket places where different behaviors work, different ways of working will work

best, different technologies that won't hand over to AI and some that will, some of that will

embed AI into actually the product solution, some that will use AI to build the product

solution.

35:39: All of these require different technologies, techniques, testing, different people,

different ideas, like some of the best ways to test AI systems is generating data via AI.

35:50: So yeah, you're gonna have a much better use case for data generation now using

AI as a tool to help you, and if your world isn't AI you can still use it to help you, which is

great.

35:59: So it can speed up practices that may be ancient, so like a banking system, you need

to create 10,000 customers to do a load test or something crazy.

36:07: And a clean database, you've got tools that now enable that much faster, much more

effectively, clean world, different complexity, and things like that, so I think our world is

evolving, but I, I do think of it as an evolution because there is as much as people talk about

bubbles and bursting and all these things, even when the dot com bubble burst, the web was

still there.

36:29: You know, what we did, what tools you had, where the investment went.

36:33: Yeah, it was more the markets that fluctuated because of that, people killed off lots of

ideas, no one invested in new ideas.

36:39: Those were the things that impact us.

36:41: But actually websites still existed.

36:43: Websites still evolve.

36:44: Does anyone remember seeing the old Amazon website from way back in the day?

36:49: It, it has changed somewhat remarkably because of engineers, because of people

still.

36:54: And so the bubbles burst.

36:57: people move away, everyone gets scared, and then actually things grow again.

37:02: Same happened in some ways from the COVID.

37:05: Like everyone stopped doing everything, everyone figure out what's happening, right,

we need to figure out what's happening, right, we need to get online.

37:10: We need to have an online presence because we can't do a shopfront anymore, no

one can visit us.

37:14: And boom, technology.

37:16: And then everyone went, oh, we're paying them a fortune, we can't afford this

anymore.

37:20: Stop.

37:21: Lay off loads of people, right?

37:23: And then they went, oh, we need more technology again, AI's coming, right, hire lots

of people.

37:27: And then, right, lay off loads of people cos AI's going to do the job.

37:30: So there's swings and roundabouts of our field of IT in general, we're part of that and

it will, we will see shifts in it and it comes down to being adaptable as people.

37:40: We have to be adaptable because what tomorrow brings, as Dan said at the start, I

think about sort of automation.

37:47: The tools evolve, the tools change like.

37:50: Selenium, cucumber is mentioned once upon a time.37:53: I'm trying to think of tools from a long time ago, was it rational software tester, quick

test, all sorts of different things have existed and moved on, and now you've got playwrights,

you've got Cyprus that's come and been.

38:05: You've got visual testing improving in what it can do.

38:09: So we'll learn new techniques.

38:10: There'll be new tools that do new things in new ways, and our field will grow.

38:15: and hopefully it will use people.

38:18: I still think there's a huge part of what we do that is the people orientated, not

automation.

38:23: And actually AI will help with the automation side, probably more than the people

side.

38:29: Yeah, in my view.

38:30: I always think that as long as we have people using software, we will have to have

people that are testing.

38:36: Maybe one day when all the computers talk to computers and there's no human in

the mix, we will no longer have to have testers, but until that day, we will be here.

38:48: I, I, I, I'm inclined to agree.

38:51: I, I, I'm hopeful of that as well.

38:55: But there's a part of me that worries that it's going to take something quite major.

39:02: Big a disaster or incident of some kind.

39:07: Where a quality engineer or test engineer might have had an impact, but they weren't

there because of AI.

39:17: And we can hold off the I told you so sign.

39:21: But that's precisely what Callum told us not to do.

39:25: Oh wait, no, no, that's true, but it, it's, it is so tempting because I know we all feel that

moment, and here's hoping we're part of the conversation.

39:34: Whilst it's helpful to be be a critical friend to our technical colleagues across the

whole spectrum of engineering skills.

39:44: I don't think the, I, yeah, I love the I told you so joke or sign or meme is.

39:52: My favorite is, of course, the being a Star Trek fan, the Picard's sort of face palm.

39:57: Like that, listeners will not see me with my head in my hands cupping my, my bridge

of my nose, but I think you can imagine it's from an episode called The Drumhead.

40:08: but it's a very well known GIF of Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

40:15: Being very upset about something.

40:18: Maybe I'm a, I'm a, a fool, but I've, I've been around the block a bit now, you know,

I'm not exactly a spring chicken anymore.

40:25: I've seen companies that have gone, right, let's get it lay off all the testers, well, Devs

will do it.

40:30: And I've seen sort of cycles of these things happen.

40:33: So, and mistakes have happened, bugs have come into it, they've realized it's

probably gone too far one way without the other, and it needs to adapt again and so on, and

I've seen these cycles happen multiple places.

40:45: And I've seen very few be successful with it, shall we say, and that's kind of what I

envisaged with AI is in there'll be a massive layoffs, some companies will have success with

it, majority won't be mature enough or won't have the other things in place to make it

successful.

41:02: We'll do the kind of the, the chop off the head and then wonder why the terrorist

organization's still going on, etc.41:09: because you know, there's other people there, they just took the tip off the head of

the snake type thing rather than actually solving the problem.

41:16: Sometimes, yeah, sometimes they need to actually address the wider problems and

just simply getting rid of people doesn't do that.

41:24: putting the right things in place can, and therefore people like ourselves and others

are actually can influence other people to put the right checks and balances, to use tools

most appropriately, to get the best value out of them.

41:37: And that's where I think the human aspects always remains, to Tara's point.

41:43: I think we've got to work on.

41:46: adapting to that situation, because it will be adaptation.

41:49: It's not gonna be the same as it was 6 months ago, 6 years ago, 6 decades ago.

41:54: But you know, once upon a time you used to have to put punch to cards into

machines to get them to work.

41:59: The world evolves and we just have to adapt with it.

42:04: you know.

42:05: But it's fine.

42:08: And on that jolly note, listener, I think we're probably gonna draw ourselves to a close

for this episode.

42:17: Many thanks to the wonderful Dan Billing for joining us, we hope to have you on

again soon, my friend.

42:23: Any time if there's anything.

42:27: Interesting I wanna talk about, I'll be in touch and, but likewise, just ping me if you

need, if you've got room for me.

42:35: Absolutely.

42:36: Thank you so much.

42:37: So listener, the only thing we really want to do is, is hear from you.

42:42: Contact us at testing Piers.com, find us on LinkedIn, or if you want to find us in real

life, you can find us at Pierscon27.

42:54: March 11th in 2027, same venue.

43:00: Same great vibe, bigger and better.

43:03: You can find more details at testingierscon.com.

43:08: Until next time, listener.

43:11: Goodbye.