So hi everybody to this first episode of Testing Unleashed, the new podcast for software quality and software testing. My name is Richard Seidel, short Richie, and I'm a software tester since I can remember. I was a developer in former life.
Developing software is still a nice hobby and I like scripting and so on, but on my way I decided to go to more to testing and to quality assurance and test automation and this is what I bring in companies, in organizations up to now as a coach, as a mentor for test managers and testers where I lead them to a new way of thinking quality and to bring quality into the projects.
Yeah and I will be your host for the next episodes where I usually interview some people from our quality branch of our community who have to say something, who have good topics, new minds, new thoughts about how can we deal with software quality. And this podcast should also be a very broad one.
So not just in the technical methods of quality assurance and testing, but also in soft skills and how do we deal with conflicts in our teams and how do we use AI and so stuff and how do we design our CI/CD pipelines and so on. We will discuss everything according to software engineering, but with the focus on quality. As you know, one subclaim of this core podcast is quality as an attitude.
This is one thing I think was really forced into the community when we started the Agile stuff about 25 years now ago, that we cannot just use test methods and this stuff, but we have to think quality all over the software development process. And why this podcast? So I think times are getting tough for us in the quality area. We have a huge impact now with the old AI stuff. We still have to struggle sometimes with DevOps and agile transformations.
And software quality gets every day more important because we have to deal with that in the production areas and in our life and in our society. We need good software. And it's so crucial to have a good quality today. But also to think about how much quality is enough for our software product. And this podcast wants to deliver something back to the community, because I learned so much from a lot of good minds who mentored me all over my way of my career.
And now I want to give back to the community, inspiration, some new thoughts, some new ideas. How can we deal with all this quality stuff? So this podcast is for you. It's for you to learn, to get inspired, to try something new, to get a new perspective on some things. but also to participate.
So please, if you have any feedback for this podcast, for guests you want to hear in this podcast, or topics you want to hear there, or even if you on your own want to be guest in this podcast, just contact me at podcast@testing-unleashed.fm. And then we will discuss, and I can try if I can put it into the editorial calendar. So this podcast will be, if I've calculated correctly and I've done my plan correctly, there will be a new episode each week.
Beginning with this first, we have some more interesting topics. But then and there regularly, it should be a weekly podcast here on this channel, on audio and on video on YouTube. So you can join each channel what you like. And if you want to get informed about all this stuff, you find me on LinkedIn and can then follow me there to see when there are new episodes or topics I want to discuss with the community.
So why do I think this podcast is so important now, or giving new ideas into the community is so important? I think there are different parts in our software engineering process now we have to deal with. And the first one is about the role of a software tester or a quality engineer sometimes today, or how we call them, or a test automation engineer and a test manager. I think all these roles developed a lot in the last 20 years.
And when I get my first computer, I think it was in 1989, and I developed some programs with BASIC and this stuff. And then going into the business, the next years, their typical developer was also the tester. So even if it gets worse, the developer with the poorest skills gets a tester who has to test all the stuff. There were no really test methods and strategies how to test the product and how to assure quality and how to measure quality.
But in this 30, 25 years, a lot of change was there in the testing area, mainly driven through more standardization to new methods and strategies. How can we check quality, and how can we test our software? There was the introduction or the more awareness for test methods, which are-- some of them are really old now. But to use the test methods to define a test strategy, to define a test plan, and this was crucial for the professionalism of testing.
So the tester, even through certification or training or something, gets more aware in the teams and the companies began to enforce some teams of testers in the software development lifecycle. So there are sometimes test departments or sometimes test centers, so-called, or a test factory in an organization who delivers test services into the projects. And in former times before Agile, we had this waterfall projects where a test team has to do all the stuff at the end.
But the testers get this professionalism in the development team. But what we saw in the last year is also very separating from the development team. So the developer is on the one side, the tester on the other side. And when we started all this agile stuff, these two roles came back together. So the tester is more the quality coach guy in the team who helps the developer to build better unit and integration tests to fill in these seeds of quality into the team.
And also the developer get more awareness for how can we build in quality into the software. So there's like a pendular between the separated tester and now back to the quality engineer in the teams who does all this quality stuff there. And there's also a trade-off in how an expert you are. So in some time, you have a tester who has all these test methods and is extreme good and deep in these test methods.
But if you see the software quality part, you have to have a broad bandwidth of knowledge, which leads that you don't have this death in test methods eventually. So the possible role of a tester in this days or in the future is very transforming, very fluid. It depends on all the organization, on the software development, state of the art processes, the best patterns we have
to use. So it's not so easy to define which fits best. So we have always to think about what does a tester do and I think in the next years when we get all the way from software developed by AI and so stuff I think this role gets even more important. In the last years also the rise of the test automation engineer as a professional role is also very important, but this leads to another different role in all the projects. So this podcast is also about how can you learn new skills?
How can you improve your skills and in which direction do you want to go? Maybe you are now a business tester and say, "Okay, I want to go in the direction of test automation," or, "I'm a developer and I want to do more of the testing stuff," and so on. So I hope this podcast will help you to define your role in your team or for your team. The other part is the part of the test automation. I think test automation has a huge involvement since we started with Agile.
When 25 years ago, the first projects began to use sprints and iterations. few sprints you recognize that regression tests, that manual testing is not really possible. So the test automation was even more important than in former times. And this had some impacts. We had a lot of new tools in the last years, who helps test automation implementation on the different test levels, especially on the UI and end-to-end level. But also, we have now the discussion, where do we test what?
We have the automated unit integration tests, system tests, or UI tests, or contract-based testing, if you think of API testing. So it's always a question in the team, where I do I automate what? And this is mainly a part, I think, we have to discuss in the teams. But this discussion often is not there because the testers are doing their stuff and the developer doing their stuff.
And to improve this communication and this exchange between the different roles is I think one part which is very important for the future of test automation. And I think when we think of test automation, we have a huge innovation on the horizon. This is all about the AI agents who are doing their tasks on their own, maybe testing some parts of our system.
Just to be clear here, I don't think that AI will take over all the testing stuff in the near future because it's mainly a business of trust, our testing business. But I think there are a lot of aspects where we can use AI, especially in test automation in the future. So I think there will be a huge impact on this all AI agent stuff. And this is also one part we will discuss here in the podcast.
Starting tomorrow with the second episode, in this episode, I will have Gilles Lachelle in my podcast here, who talks about the AI agent. And not only the automation of the pure test automation view, I think we also have to deal with a lot of automation in our daily work, automate our processes, automate our pipelines and all these tasks, test data generation.
I think there is a lot to do for the testers and this is also a part I think we have to be aware of and we want to discuss in this podcast in the future. Another part is all the team structure. I mentioned before when the ROSE is nearby there, if you think about the agile team and build an agile team. It's often very easy to say in agile that your whole team has the responsibility for quality. If you just say that to a team, nobody is responsible. Maybe you know it from your company.
So you have to build in this quality mindset into your team. And it's not a thing of the tester anymore. But the tester and the quality people are often the people who put in this change into the team to get the UX designer, the business analyst, the developer, something from ops, and so to think more in the direction of quality. So that really everybody has their part in this whole quality assurance and built-in quality process in software development.
And I think also there is a big change in the last years. And a lot of companies, teams, and projects are still struggling with all this change and transformation, because sometimes this is also not done very good, the transformation process. But I think we as a tester, with all our knowledge and connecting the dots in the software engineering process, have a huge impact there to make it better.
The other part is that we see that in this whole project area, and we have a lot of different project types. So in former times, there was something like waterfall, but I don't really think that real waterfall was ever on the place there. But then with beginning of the older agile frameworks and agile thinking and mindset, there are now a broad band of different project types you can have in your organization, from hybrid ones, from pure agile, from something in between.
So it's very individual project development, meanwhile, in the organizations and in the community. And there we have to deal with all the CI/CD stuff. How do we do the right agile, just following some methods or thinking the agile values and thinking about quality in this agile environment, and what's about the quality and agile mindset and this stuff. So I think this will be a big part in this podcast, too.
And I think we have in the last two, three years a very interesting part that we have to think more about our non-functional requirements. In Europe, it's mainly forced by the regulatory affairs, which say, OK, you have to think about your security, about your usability, and all this stuff up front in the project and over the whole project. So it's not done by doing a pen test at the end or doing some review at the end.
So you have to think all these non-functional parts or the important ones throughout the whole process. So we started in the projects to think about, what about security by design? What about usability by design? Because you all know, if you change something in the architecture or something like that at the end of the project, it can be very cost-intense because you have to change something, the architecture and so on. So it's not very cheap.
So it's a good thing to think about all this stuff throughout the process and the project. But this also is a new task we have to deal with in the whole team. If it's the developer or the architect or a tester or on test automation, we all have to think about these things too. So how can we do this if we have a full day with our daily work anyway? So I think this is also a part we have to discuss now and in the next months here in the podcast.
Yeah, and one part I want to mention-- I hope so not very often, but in the right point-- is to talk about AI. Because we have to talk about AI, but we have to go into the depth of AI and how does it change our way we work. I think AI is now democratizing our whole software development.
So when we look in former innovations, like was Netflix for the video viewing or Airbnb for hotels or something like that, or the web for communicating and building content, We have always-- software development was a fortress, which has only been done by software developers. And we did it good. We did our projects and programmed and so on. But now we see that with AI, everybody is able to build software. It's called white coding. Sometimes it's built AI-driven programming, something like that.
There is also a big broadband from using AI as a support there or building a whole application with AI. And this is, I think, just the beginning. So I think when everybody is able to build an app and a website and some applications and is doing that, we will get a huge amount of software in the next months and years from people who are mainly not the software developers. And who decides if this software is good?
We have a lot of software then to test, and the quality can be good, but it also can be very bad. There can be pitfalls in there or something like that, or security vulnerabilities, all this stuff. So we have to deal with that. AI supports software development now very much. And how can we use it in testing? How can we support our testing frameworks with AI? Should we replace some tests with AI tests, AI-driven tests? Or should we focus on more edge cases or something like that?
There is a huge discussion now in the whole community. And I think there is no real answer now, because we all have to explore. We have to learn how to deal with the stuff. And if we look now at testing, testing is a lot about building trust. It's about gathering information from out of a test object, and then give the stakeholders an idea how the quality is that they can sit back and say, OK, we have a good software here, and it's everything fine.
So now if an AI will take over the whole testing process, I think this trust is not existent anymore. But it will be in anywhere in the future that AI will more support us in developing better test cases or doing some test automation and so on. And the other part is not just that we use AI, but we also have to deal that we have to do more tests with AI, so that we are testing AI systems. And I think there is also a big black hole for a lot of people in the software project environment.
Because testing in AI, you know, if you have a classical test case which says put something in, you get the expected result. When you put it in an AI, you have every time another result. So you have to focus on what are you testing in AI. Do you test the model? Do you test the training? some interfaces, you have to think about what quality characteristics are you using and is there
more, not a really deterministic way of testing this or mass statistical testing. So a lot of new methods will be generated in the next month and even are now generated to test AI systems. And I think this is also a part we have to deal with and we will discuss in this. podcast. Yeah, and this all leads to one point. I think it's for us, not for testers only, but also for quality minded developers, for UX experts, for business analysts, project
managers and people you can think in the software development process. It's crucial to think about which skills do I need, which mindset do I need, and which tools can I use. And I think in these times it's not so important to use this or that tool, but to have a mindset and to have values and some methods and strategies to use any tool. And so for me, the whole part of personal development in our team, for our individuals,
us as testers, as developer and so on. This is crucial to survive in this world which gets more AI driven. So this podcast is mainly under the brackets of personal development to give you an inspiration, give you some ideas of skills and maybe that you can go out there to learn more, to get better in your job and to rethink about old beliefs you have, maybe to build a new personal strength to survive in this software project in the future. Or to decide to get into the projects.
I have also in my German podcast some people who write me, who wrote me that they joined software testing and the software engineering process from outside because they heard the podcast and were what is software testing. So maybe you dive in into the software testing or you say, "Okay, I will... nothing have to do with that. I go out and will be something, a UX designer or something like that, or a gardener or something like that." That's also good. But think about the personal
development as one of the brackets for this podcast. Yeah, and this leads to my... to the The claim back quality is an attitude. I think everybody in the project has to think quality, and it's not that easy as this sentence says it. So thinking in quality and thinking with quality as a trade-off to our time constraints, to our fast release cycles, and so on, it's not so easy. And this podcast should help you with that and should help you to get better in your job and to build better software.
And I hope you have fun with this podcast in the next month or when you hear it. I hope you share the content with your network. Maybe you have someone who should also hear the podcast to send it here. This is a community podcast. It's from the community to the community. So there is no investment behind or something like that. I want to give you, the community, an inspiration, a new thinking and some new ideas. And I hope it will work.
And yeah, so stay in touch, follow the podcast and have fun with all the episodes which are coming in the next months. And if you have any feedback, I remind you again, write me at podcast@testing-unleashed.fm. Have a good day, thank you very much, bye bye.