BeyondQuality

Vitaly Sharovatov

The Beyond Quality Podcast brings QA/QE professionals together to explore current research from our collaborative community. Each month, we discuss open projects, share insights, and highlight how collaborative work is pushing the craft of quality forward.

Episodes

  1. 3D AGO

    Episode 8: AI generates code. Who carries the understanding?

    Vitaly, Anupam, and Maryia sit down with Liliia Abdulina — Head of QA at JetBrains and co-researcher on the BeyondQuality AI-era testing study — who came to this topic the way most useful research starts: with a real problem on her hands. Developers at JetBrains were accelerating with AI, QA was becoming the bottleneck, and she wanted to understand why. The conversation that follows makes the case that this bottleneck isn't new — managers were already complaining "why is testing delaying us" long before AI. What AI did was make a structural problem impossible to ignore. When humans wrote code, understanding came for free: the person who wrote it carried the mental model. Now code is generated at machine speed and nobody carries it. The group calls this cognitive debt — distinct from technical debt, and harder to see. But the subtler casualty is learning. When a tester finds a bug, the developer carries that knowledge forward and writes fewer similar bugs next cycle. Agents don't learn across sessions, so the loop breaks. The industry's response has been to flood the market with AI inspection tools, because inspection is easy to automate. Prevention — which costs less — requires domain understanding that agents don't have, and nobody is building tools for that. Links: 1. Lilia's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liliiaabdulina/ 2. research discussion https://github.com/BeyondQuality/beyondquality/discussions/28 and current artifact https://github.com/BeyondQuality/beyondquality/blob/main/research/ai-era-testing/analysis.md 3. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/ten-months-with-cca-in-dotnet-runtime/ 4. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.22106v2 Sponsors: 1. Qase https://qase.io/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=beyondquality&utm_campaign=devadvocacy 2. Regent https://regent.se 3. AnuKrit https://anukrit.de

    50 min
  2. FEB 27

    Episode 7: "On trust"

    Maryia, Vitaly, and Anupam sit down with Asya Isakova — an organisational psychologist who's been studying how people function at work since 2007 — to explore her BeyondQuality research on trust in teams. The most counterintuitive finding: trust matters most in hierarchical organisations, precisely the ones that tend to destroy it with KPIs and approval chains. In high-hierarchy teams, subordinates decide what information to share based on whether they trust their manager — and if they don't, the entire decision chain corrupts. The conversation unpacks how lack of trust works like a tax: full workdays wasted on two-minute tasks, teams of 20 writing reports instead of working, $15 purchase orders going through five approvals. Why vulnerability — the core of trust — is the hardest thing for leaders to accept. And why preventive quality work like pair programming or shifting testing left simply cannot start without trust: you can't prove a prevented bug, so if nobody trusts you, nobody lets you try. Links: 1. Asya's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/asyaisakova/ 2. Asya's research proposal: https://github.com/BeyondQuality/beyondquality/discussions/26 3. Organizational Justice meta-analysis: https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2013-06399-001 4. Trust factors and performance review: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1081086/full 5. Team factors and trust: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/job.2436 Sponsors: 1. Qase https://qase.io/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=beyondquality&utm_campaign=devadvocacy 2. Regent https://regent.se 3. AnuKrit https://anukrit.de

    47 min

About

The Beyond Quality Podcast brings QA/QE professionals together to explore current research from our collaborative community. Each month, we discuss open projects, share insights, and highlight how collaborative work is pushing the craft of quality forward.