Advertise on podcast: Into The MoTaverse

"How do you sleep at night?" is a question the MoTaverse team asks internally when making decisions, with a specific focus on the AI world,, so Rosie put it to two people who have spent decades building tools for teams who cannot afford a bad night. Arthur Hicken has been at Parasoft since 1992. Igor Kirilenko joined fourteen years ago and now leads the product. Arthur's answer starts with the 2am phone call. You can stay in firefighting mode forever, or you can stop lighting fires, which means thinking ahead about the crazy user, the cyber attack, the slow network, the ten million users you never planned for. Igor's answer is visibility. Do you know what you tested, can you repeat it, and can you even finish the suite overnight? Then AI arrives and unsettles both answers. They cover why the "let AI discover and test everything" pitch has gone quiet, the repeatability problem that killed it, test impact analysis for rerunning only what a build touches, service virtualization for non-deterministic dependencies, automated remediation, and why safety critical teams carry the most worry but sleep the easiest. Follow Arthur Hicken and Igor Kirilenko and Rosie Sherry

Joe Colantonio runs TestGuild. It has been twelve years since Rosie was last on his podcast, and long enough for both of them to have watched the same ideas come round more than once. The loop is hard to miss. Testing skill mattered, then tooling mattered, then everyone had to become a developer, and now AI writes the code and testing skill matters again. WinRunner would fix reliability, then Selenium would, then Playwright. Keyword-driven testing and behaviour-driven development were both going to let everyone test. Joe watched both roll out at GE and neither stuck. He started an AI testing summit in 2018 to near silence. And yet they are both clearly enjoying themselves. Rosie rebuilt her personal site with Lovable, imported her old tweets, and built Spaceducking as a deliberately buggy practice site. Joe vibe coded a test tool matcher and an accessibility scanner, neither of which he needed. Half the time goes on testing what the AI produced, which is the point. Resources: The Ahh Test Quality is Care TestGuild

Dr Michaela Greiler has spent over a decade researching code review, first at Microsoft Research and the Visual Studio team, then as Head of Research at DX, and now through her own research and consultancy work. In this episode she talks to Rosie Sherry about what agentic development is doing to one of software's most central practices. Michaela names two failure modes she's seeing in teams: code review exploitation, where verification work gets shifted onto a peer reviewer who never had the mental model in the first place, and code review surrender, where reviewers simply can't keep up with the volume and things get waved through. She walks through SCOPE, the model she's developing, which stands for Staged Code Oversight with Proportional Escalation, and explains why she thinks code review needs to start in the planning phase rather than at the pull request. Michaela makes the case that reviewing test code, long the lowest priority on most teams, now matters more than ever, because agent-generated tests can signal safety where there is none.

Karim Jouini is CEO and co-founder of Thunders, an AI testing company built after he and his co-founder Jihed Othmani sold their expense management business, Expensya. He's never held a tester job title, but he's managed QA teams for most of his career, first at Microsoft and then across a fintech operating in sixty countries where regulation changed two or three times a week. In this episode, Karim tells Rosie about beta testing the Xbox Kinect, a project he says was far harder to test than to build, and about the hiring culture he pushed back on at Microsoft, where strong engineers were steered into development and average ones into testing. He and Rosie land on "quality architect" as a title worth making popular, and talk through what that role actually needs: management skills, systems thinking, an understanding of the whole delivery loop, and product-oriented quality metrics.

Simon Tomes returns to Into the MoTaverse for a six-month check-in with Rosie on Community as a Service, care, joy, and the slow pivot to becoming a tech community. Simon Tomes, the MoTaverse's Community Lead, returns for his second appearance on Into the MoTaverse, roughly seven months after his first, for a reflective check-in on what's changed. Rosie and Simon revisit "Community as a Service," the idea that grew out of a fuzzy December/January conversation and has since become the backbone of decisions like making professional membership mandatory to contribute, introducing "layers of care," and building out the star and badge system. They talk through the ongoing Chapters migration, the rise of Moments as a blogging platform baked into the star system, and the growing role of recorded conversations: Into the MoTaverse, Call for Insights, This Week in Quality, and round tables as a form of community service in themselves. The conversation also covers the MoTaverse's long, deliberate pivot from a testing and quality community toward a broader tech community, including the new Engineering Managers chapter and the Leading with AI event run in partnership with PwC. Throughout, joy comes up again and again as the metric that matters most. Follow Simon Tomes and Rosie Sherry in the MoTaverse.

Stephen Platten is a principal consultant at Inspire Testing, a MoTaverse ambassador, and the writer behind LinkedIn's "The Stoic Tester." A former Royal Air Force engineer who spent over a decade on fast jets before moving into trials, evaluation, and validation work, Stephen went on to lead test delivery at Yorkshire Water, work as a chapter lead at Admiral Insurance, and now consults across quality and testing for Inspire Testing. In this episode, Stephen and Rosie explore how Stoic philosophy shaped his approach to critical thinking, and why that skill matters more than ever in the age of AI. They dig into Anthony Weston's Rule Book of Arguments, unpack logical fallacies like appeal to automation, appeal to authority, false dilemma, hasty generalisation, and survivorship bias, and discuss how testers can use bottom-up, systems thinking to challenge AI-generated content. The conversation also covers root cause analysis and human factors borrowed from Stephen's Air Force background, why AI strategy gets more attention than AI governance, and how evidence-based arguments, not stronger opinions, should win the day. Follow Stephen Platten and Rosie Sherry in the MoTaverse.

Adriana Vilela is a Principal Developer Advocate at Dynatrace and a core contributor to OpenTelemetry, the open source standard for instrumenting applications that has become one of the highest-velocity projects in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. In this episode, Adriana and Rosie trace the arc of long careers in tech, from Java development in the early 2000s to the current age of AI-assisted coding, and reflect on what has actually changed and what hasn't. They dig into what observability means for testers (more than most people think), the idea of telemetry as a quality gate, and why OpenTelemetry's vendor-neutral community model is a rare success story worth studying. The conversation also navigates into AI slop, the flood of low-effort AI-generated pull requests threatening open source communities, and what project maintainers, community builders, and organisations can actually do about it. If you work in quality, DevOps, or community, this one connects threads you probably haven't seen joined up before.

Abby Bangser is a principal founding engineer at Syntasso, a CNCF ambassador, and a Team Topologies advocate. She started her career in QA and has spent two decades working in internal tooling, DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering. Always with quality at the centre. In this episode, Rosie and Abby explore platform engineering through a quality lens. They cover what it actually means to treat a platform as software, why Richard Seroter's "shift down" framing matters more than shift left, and how quality engineers can engage with platform teams. As users, contributors, and embedded practitioners. Abby introduces the "thinnest viable platform" concept from Gregor Hophe, explains why ephemeral test environments are a natural platform engineering win, and makes the case that AI-era software development plays directly to quality engineers' strengths. They also dig into community, career confidence, and why SRE is, in Abby's words, "just quality at the systems level." Follow Abby Bangser and Rosie Sherry in the MoTaverse.

Adam Davis is a software engineering manager who spends his spare hours building pixelmesh. It’s a system that turns a room full of phones into a single coordinated light display, inspired by the glowing wristbands at Coldplay concerts. In this episode he walks through the engineering, the testing, and the hard-won lessons from demoing it live at the Manchester MoTaverse chapter meetup. The conversation moves quickly from the technical (Morse-code blink detection, region-of-interest camera clipping, eighty-metre range tests from a cul-de-sac at midnight) to the bigger idea: that the prompt engineering craze has distracted people from what actually matters in AI-assisted work. When AI cannot physically see your problem, no amount of clever prompting helps. What helps is observability — structured telemetry, pixel data, debug runs, video replay. Adam explains how treating observability as a day-one practice changed his project, cut costs dramatically, and gave him the data to make AI a genuine debug partner rather than a code generator.

There's a version of this story where Preeti Gupta questions her future in quality. Where the months of silence from employers, the CVs filtered by bots, or the well-meaning advice to retrain or change direction. That's not this story. Preeti has seventeen years in quality engineering. But there’s more than that, she's someone who has genuinely put in the work. She's shown up at chapter events. She's travelled to be in the room. There are selfies (with me) to prove it. And if you've spent any time in the MoTaverse, you'll have probably seen her there. It’s been a pleasure to get to know her over the past 18 months. This episode is for anyone who's wondered whether the effort of finding their next quality role is worth it. For anyone who's shown up, invested, and still found themselves overlooked. It is worth it. Preeti's journey is proof. Follow Preeti Gupta and Rosie Sherry in the MoTaverse.

Coding has accelerated. Everything else hasn't. In this episode, Rosie talks with Dan Faulkner, CEO of SmartBear, about what happens when one part of the software development lifecycle runs ahead and leaves the rest behind. It's a conversation that will resonate with anyone in quality, security, design, or DevOps who's felt the pressure of more software arriving faster, with the same size team and the same tools to handle it. They get into why intent validation, checking whether agentic code actually built what you asked for, is becoming one of the most important new steps in the SDLC, and why quality professionals are better placed than most to own it. Dan also makes the case for frameworks over fixed opinions, experimental thinking over endless debate, and building bridges across disciplines rather than defending territory. If you've been trying to articulate why quality still matters in an AI-accelerated world, this episode gives you some language to do it with.

Rahul Parwal is a MoTaverse Ambassador, MoTaCon speaker, and Masterclass contributor, course creator, and so much more! In this episode he joins Rosie to talk through what it actually looks like to level up with AI as a quality professional. They cover where to start (primary sources, not social media hype), how to build consistency through community, and why the thirty days of AI and testing sprint was Rahul's own entry point into serious AI experimentation. The conversation gets practical fast: Rahul introduces a useful two-axis framework: algorithmic vs. creative work, siloed vs. social work, to help people decide where AI genuinely adds value and where it burns tokens for little return. They also tackle the cost of AI head-on, using the Uber example of exhausting an annual AI budget by April, and discuss what sustainable AI practices might look like. Claude's artifacts and co-work mode, MCP, the MoT glossary project, and the consolidation of AI tooling all get a mention.

Rosie Sherry is joined by Amy Phillips, a senior engineering manager with a career spanning test consultancy, startup life, and leading infrastructure and product teams. Amy reflects on what's stayed constant across fifteen years of change (it’s the people!) and what's shifted dramatically. They dig into the tension between process and creativity, why removing things matters as much as building them, and how AI is reshaping both individual contributor roles and management itself. Amy shares practical thinking on guardrails, platform mindset, and how to make it easy for people to do the right thing. Follow Amy and Rosie in the MoTaverse.

Tristan Lombard, marketer, community builder, ghost author, and self-described Stage Mom, joins Rosie Sherry to talk about one of the most pressing questions in tech right now: what do you do when the traditional career path stops working for you? Drawing on three years of solopreneurship and a decade of community-building before that, Tristan makes a compelling, data-backed, and deeply human case for going it alone, particularly for quality engineers whose roles are shifting under the pressure of AI and ongoing layoffs. This episode is less about theory and more about the practical stuff: how to identify what you're actually known for, how to build a brand of value (not a personal brand) on LinkedIn, how to approach DMs without being predatory, how to price your work, and how to protect your energy when clients push past the boundaries of your SOW. Tristan brings the warmth, the receipts, and the occasional sharp word for life coaches who slide into DMs uninvited. Follow Tristan and Rosie in the MoTaverse.

Rosie Sherry sits down with Paul Reinheimer, co-founder of WonderProxy, for a wide-ranging founder-to-founder conversation that goes well beyond localization testing. Paul shares the origin story of WonderProxy, which was born out of a favour to a friend stuck testing websites with dodgy free proxies, and reflects on what it means to build a company slowly and deliberately over two decades, turning away more than 80% of free trial requests because the wrong customers simply aren't worth it. The conversation covers the unglamorous realities of founding: wearing five hats at once, managing employment law across borders, navigating a decade-overdue price increase, and learning, sometimes reluctantly, to let your team make decisions without you. Follow Paul and Rosie in the MoTaverse.