Quality Remarks

“Probably the best ethics talk I’ve ever heard” – AOTB Moderator The talk I gave at Agile on the Beach this summer was one of the most personal and difficult talks I’ve given in my career.

A huge thank you to the Management Consultancies Association for this recognition, and to KPMG UK for giving me the opportunity, support, and encouragement throughout this year’s awards.

“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

Thanks to my friend Angie Jones at the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), I got to attend their flagship conference AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe in Amsterdam this month.

Guess what, somebody did some actual research on testing agentic systems, and they accidentally found out that good software testing is hard.

I’ve written in the past about the path we’re headed down in the software testing and quality engineering business.

In our standard cynical mix of technologists first world willful ignorance, moral relativism, and “bought and paid for” integrity, there’s more high-profile resignations in the world of AI safety with a “slow down” called for by the biggest labs at the fr…

You want to know why you shouldn’t try to “engineer” confidence?

In Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Josef K. wakes up one morning to discover that he has been arrested.

For years, those of us who view testing as skilled knowledge work were told there’s no such thing as a “testing mindset.”

In July 2025, venture capitalist Jason Lemkin was using Replit’s AI agent to build an application when it deleted his production database.

It’s been a long time coming, but on August 2nd, the EU AI Act stopped being a theoretical regulatory discussion and started the long road into enforcement.

I’m getting a lot of contact from mid-level test managers as well as a fair number of senior ones either looking for work post redundancy or trying to get ahead of an impending one.

I’m taking a break for a bit from AI social commentary and the increasingly tedious (and boring) work of watching the AI Confidence Bros and test tool vendors discover testing for the first time.

I posted this paper my friend Michael Bolton sent me a while ago about the LLM Mentalist Effect in the AI Testing and Assurance group as a risk we need to test for in AI systems.

I have now sat through multiple vendor demonstrations built around the same supposedly inevitable future that AI will generate so much code, so quickly, that human beings will no longer be able to test it.

If the latest AI Safety Index isn’t the bucket of cold water you needed about the people shoehorning GenAI into every aspect our lives while blowing a multi-trillion dollar hole in the global economy, I don’t know how to help you.