TestTalks.AI - The Testing AI Podcast

N26's head of quality engineering on leadership and building a region-agnostic global banking platform.
Milan Kuveljic recounts a twelve-year journey from selling test automation to banks, through a Berlin gaming startup, to leading quality engineering at digital bank N26 across 500 engineers and 40+ teams. He describes lead-by-example leadership shaped by mentors and Jerry Weinberg's systems thinking, and admitting mistakes to build trust. Much of the conversation covers the complexity of a region-agnostic global platform where the same service deploys to different regions with different currencies, data and regulations, demanding rethought test suites, pipelines and test data. He explains N26's shift from quality assurance to quality engineering, distributing testing responsibility across cross-functional roles and moving effort into planning, which shortened release cadence and increased microservice deployment frequency for five million customers.
**In this episode:**- QA Leadership- Team Building & Hiring- Shift-Left Testing- DevOps & QAOps- Continuous Testing- Test Data & Environments- Cloud Testing- Mentoring & Community
**Guest:** Milan Kuveljic — Head of Quality Engineering, N26  **Host:** Jonathon Wright — *The Automation Cyborg*
> “Move away from assurance, build a lightweight testing phase, and move things more into the planning and implementation phase.”
🎧 *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.*
## Hashtags#SoftwareTesting #QA #QualityEngineering #TheQALead #TestingPodcast #QALeadership #Hiring #ShiftLeft #DevOps #ContinuousTesting #TestEnvironments #CloudTesting #Mentoring #QEOps

A QA lead on using Docker to reach continuous testing and building the QA Serbia community.
Nenad Cvetkovic, a QA lead consultant in iGaming and active member of the QA Serbia community, shares how he teaches test automation and Docker through community events and a Test Automation Day. He argues that DevOps is a tester's best friend and that true continuous testing requires containerizing not just the test framework but the application itself, enabling parallel isolated test cases with fresh databases per run. He offers practical advice on building logging and reporting into frameworks from the start, capturing request/response state for root-cause analysis, and using a component-based page object model with proper synchronization to keep UI tests robust rather than fragile. He also warns against mixing functional and performance concerns and against ignoring capacity planning and configuration-as-code in containerized deployments.
**In this episode:**- Test Automation- Continuous Testing- DevOps & QAOps- Test Data Management- Mentoring & Community- Test Metrics & Reporting- Performance Testing- BDD & TDD
**Guest:** Nenad Cvetkovic — QA Lead, iGaming company / QA Serbia community  **Host:** Jonathon Wright — *The Automation Cyborg*
> “For every tester, DevOps is his best friend or her best friend. Without help of DevOps, it's almost impossible to achieve anything even close to continuous testing.”
🎧 *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.*
## Hashtags#SoftwareTesting #QA #QualityEngineering #TheQALead #TestingPodcast #TestAutomation #ContinuousTesting #DevOps #TestData #Mentoring #TestMetrics #PerformanceTesting #BDD

The Gremlin CEO on chaos engineering, resilience and finding failure before your customers do.
Kolton Andrus, who pioneered failure-injection tooling at Amazon and Netflix before founding Gremlin, explains how precise, application-level chaos experiments raised availability while cutting paging by 25%. He argues against separate QA and ops teams as an anti-pattern, insisting the team that writes code should own its quality and resilience. Distinguishing traditional from modern testing, he stresses that distributed systems fail through third-party dependencies, so engineers must test what happens when a dependency fails or slows, building timeouts, fallbacks and graceful degradation. He favors real user monitoring and canary traffic over synthetic data, ties reliability back to brand and revenue, and describes building a shared catalog of failure scenarios so teams can find and fix the low-hanging resilience risks.
**In this episode:**- Chaos Engineering & Resilience- Observability- Shift-Right Testing- DevOps & QAOps- Test Data & Environments- Performance Testing- Quality Culture- Risk-Based Testing
**Guest:** Kolton Andrus — CEO and Co-founder, Gremlin  **Host:** Jonathon Wright — *The Automation Cyborg*
> “If you can take a critical failure and turn it into a non-critical failure and someone doesn't have to get woken up in the middle of the night... that's a lot better than just a hard failure.”
🎧 *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.*
## Hashtags#SoftwareTesting #QA #QualityEngineering #TheQALead #TestingPodcast #ChaosEngineering #Observability #ShiftRight #DevOps #TestEnvironments #PerformanceTesting #QualityCulture #RiskBasedTesting #DigitalTwinTesting

A principal SDET on building same-language automation, contract testing and single-click deployment pipelines.
Arun Kumar traces his path from white-box tester at Ticketmaster to principal SDET at Smartbox, arguing that testers should be highly technical, sit in design sessions and think years ahead about scalability. He champions writing automation in the same language as the application, asking why each test is added as you climb the test pyramid, and pushing checks left so they run on the CI pipeline before deployment. A central theme is contract testing to isolate microservices and eliminate flaky end-to-end dependencies, enabling five-minute production deploys with no manual testing. He also covers tool selection (Cypress, RestSharp, Locust, Lighthouse), Dockerized environments, monitoring-as-code and treating documentation as part of the repo.
**In this episode:**- Test Automation- Contract Testing- Shift-Left Testing- Continuous Testing- DevOps & QAOps- Test Strategy- Performance Testing- Quality Culture
**Guest:** Arun Kumar — Principal Software Developer in Test, Smartbox  **Host:** Jonathon Wright — *The Automation Cyborg*
> “When we say SDET for me, it's not only testing, it's design as well. And you should be part of the design sessions.”
🎧 *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.*
## Hashtags#SoftwareTesting #QA #QualityEngineering #TheQALead #TestingPodcast #TestAutomation #ContractTesting #ShiftLeft #ContinuousTesting #DevOps #TestStrategy #PerformanceTesting #QualityCulture

A speaker and improv teacher argues the future of testing is a return to communication fundamentals.
Damian Synadinos recounts 25 years in software testing since CompuServe and his pivot to full-time professional speaking, blending testing, improv comedy and a children's book on improv principles. He argues testing has become a lost art as people chase tools and technology while neglecting fundamentals like communication, empathy, semantics, relativism and modeling. He describes mentoring a tester purely through those fundamentals until she could write an excellent bug report without ever being taught severities or steps to reproduce. He champions 'the why' over the what and how, creativity in education, and the idea that everyone is a tester, pointing people to Ineffable Solutions and the QA or the Highway conference.
**In this episode:**- Communication & Soft Skills- Mentoring & Community- Career Development in QA- Exploratory Testing- Quality Culture- Test Strategy- Usability & UX Testing
**Guest:** Damian Synadinos — Public Speaker, Trainer and Founder, Ineffable Solutions  **Host:** Jonathon Wright — *The Automation Cyborg*
> “If you answer the why, that will help you better understand the what and the how. If you try and figure out what you're doing or how to do it but you don't understand the reason, then I think you're lost.”
🎧 *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.*
## Hashtags#SoftwareTesting #QA #QualityEngineering #TheQALead #TestingPodcast #SoftSkills #Mentoring #QACareers #ExploratoryTesting #QualityCulture #TestStrategy #UXTesting #ConfidenceEngineering

A QA lead on moving into leadership, empowering teams with OKRs and owning quality as a whole team.
Mariia Hutsuk shares her eight-year journey from a Ukrainian internship and technical writing into QA, relocating to Germany and becoming QA lead of the B2B team at a TV streaming platform. She reflects on the value of ISTQB glossary knowledge, lean agile documentation over 40-page strategies, and empowering teams by putting ego aside. She explains how OKRs (from John Doerr's Measure What Matters) align developers and QAs on ambitious, measurable goals with confidence levels. She discusses automation choices (moving from Ghost Inspector toward Selenium/Java), TV quality priorities, and closes urging testers to be a 'quality hero' fighting for their own ideas.
**In this episode:**- QA Leadership- Career Development in QA- Agile Testing- Test Automation- Test Strategy- Test Metrics & Reporting- Quality Culture- Team Building & Hiring
**Guest:** Mariia Hutsuk — QA Lead, B2B Team, Zattoo  **Host:** Jonathon Wright — *The Automation Cyborg*
> “You are not supposed to be a quality champion. You should be a quality hero. The difference is that a champion is fighting for someone else's ideas and a hero is fighting for own ideas.”
🎧 *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.*
## Hashtags#SoftwareTesting #QA #QualityEngineering #TheQALead #TestingPodcast #QALeadership #QACareers #AgileTesting #TestAutomation #TestStrategy #TestMetrics #QualityCulture #Hiring

A rapid call to action for testers to help build MIT's Safe Paths COVID-19 contact-tracing app.
Todd DeCapua and Jonathan Wright record an urgent intro about MIT's Safe Paths, a mobile app that uses GPS and Bluetooth location data to help people trace exposure and self-isolate during the COVID-19 pandemic. They discuss capturing realistic movement data across trains, buses and the underground, anonymizing sensitive locations via geofencing, and using GPX logs. Jonathan draws on his Copenhagen smart-city project, where they synthesized five billion historical transactions from reference data to train algorithms and avoid false positives. The episode is a crowd-testing call to action inviting testers, developers and UX designers to volunteer via coronavirus.fo and the covidsafepaths Slack.
**In this episode:**- Test Data Management- Mobile Testing- Performance Testing- Mentoring & Community- Security Testing- Observability
**Guest:** Todd DeCapua — Technology Evangelist  **Host:** Jonathon Wright — *The Automation Cyborg*
> “You'll be helping save lives because... part of it is the information that's used there we can use to help prevent the infection growing. And I think that's really important that you can make a real difference.”
🎧 *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.*
## Hashtags#SoftwareTesting #QA #QualityEngineering #TheQALead #TestingPodcast #TestData #MobileTesting #PerformanceTesting #Mentoring #SecurityTesting #Observability #DigitalTwinTesting

A mobile testing evangelist on AI/ML, foldables, 5G and the case for continuous testing in the cloud.
Eran Kinsbruner, author of the Digital Quality Handbook and Continuous Testing books, surveys the trends reshaping testing in 2020. He highlights AI and machine learning driving root-cause analysis and self-healing codeless automation, the rise of foldable smartphones with multi-resume behavior, progressive web apps, and 5G unlocking IoT, automotive and healthcare use cases. He argues non-functional testing (performance, security, accessibility) is dangerously under-prioritized versus functional testing. He champions cloud-based test coverage strategy, tools like OpenSignal and his Test Coverage Index, and continuous testing to sustain customer retention.
**In this episode:**- Mobile Testing- AI in Testing- Continuous Testing- Performance Testing- Cloud Testing- Test Automation- Shift-Right Testing- Codeless Automation
**Guest:** Eran Kinsbruner — Chief Evangelist and Author, Perfecto  **Host:** Jonathon Wright — *The Automation Cyborg*
> “You don't enjoy maintaining quality. You need to continuously maintain it to gain continuous customer retention. You fail once, maybe they will forgive you. You fail twice, definitely your app will be deleted.”
🎧 *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.*
## Hashtags#SoftwareTesting #QA #QualityEngineering #TheQALead #TestingPodcast #MobileTesting #AITesting #ContinuousTesting #PerformanceTesting #CloudTesting #TestAutomation #ShiftRight #CodelessAutomation

A veteran program test manager and podcaster on maturity models, quality gates and reporting.
Phil Burgess, host of the IT Career Energizer podcast and a 20-plus-year testing veteran, discusses his path from surveying and construction software into program test management. The talk explores test maturity models like TMMi and CMMI, and how much process is truly needed versus process for process's sake. Phil and Jonathan dig into quality gates, managing onshore and offshore test providers, and the challenge of RAG statuses and meaningless test counts. They emphasize cascading KPIs, avoiding 'proxies' who pass data without analysis, and the shift toward outcome-based contracts under IR35.
**In this episode:**- Test Management & Tooling- Test Strategy- QA Leadership- Test Metrics & Reporting- DevOps & QAOps- Risk-Based Testing- Agile Testing- Career Development in QA
**Guest:** Phil Burgess — Program Test Manager and Podcast Host  **Host:** Jonathon Wright — *The Automation Cyborg*
> “There's so many times that I've seen people pass information on without adding anything to it. I call these people proxies... they're just taking data and then passing it through without adding anything to it.”
🎧 *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.*
## Hashtags#SoftwareTesting #QA #QualityEngineering #TheQALead #TestingPodcast #TestManagement #TestStrategy #QALeadership #TestMetrics #DevOps #RiskBasedTesting #AgileTesting #QACareers #DigitalTwinTesting

A test manager on mentoring, community, burnout and championing neurodiversity in QA teams.
Simon Prior traces his journey from C++ developer at McAfee to QA manager, then test manager at the National Lottery and EasyJet. He shares how the testing community (Twitter, Ministry of Testing, his Aylesbury meetup) fuels his growth, and stresses STEM outreach because testing is rarely taught at university. Much of the conversation is candid about mental health, including his own burnout and collapse, and how trusting and empowering teams prevents it. He advocates for a culture of quality, shifting left, valuing exploratory testing alongside automation, and building neurodiversity awareness so everyone can feel safe at work.
**In this episode:**- Mentoring & Community- QA Leadership- Career Development in QA- Quality Culture- Shift-Left Testing- Exploratory Testing- Communication & Soft Skills- Agile Testing
**Guest:** Simon Prior — Test Manager, EasyJet  **Host:** Jonathon Wright — *The Automation Cyborg*
> “As a manager, you need to be able to trust your team to do the technical day to day work. And you need to be there to advocate for them, support them, empower them, encourage them.”
🎧 *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.*
## Hashtags#SoftwareTesting #QA #QualityEngineering #TheQALead #TestingPodcast #Mentoring #QALeadership #QACareers #QualityCulture #ShiftLeft #ExploratoryTesting #SoftSkills #AgileTesting