Free Daily Podcast Summary
TestGuild Automation Podcast: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Joe Colantonio
TestGuild Automation Podcast (formally Test Talks) is a weekly podcast hosted by Joe Colantonio, which geeks out on all things software test automation. TestGuild Automation covers news found in the testing space, reviews books about automation, and speaks with some of the thought leaders in the test automation field. We'll aim to interview some of today's most successful and inspiring software engineers, and test automation thought leaders.
Latest Episodes
The most recent episodes — sign up to get AI-powered summaries of each one.
- 4 days ago45 min
Test Automation Won't Save Your QA Career, but These Skills Will with Keith Klain
Keith Klain has spent 25+ years leading enterprise quality programs in financial services and is one of the testing industry's most respected voices. In this episode, he joins Joe to discuss his BrowserStack talk, "The Death of Test Engineering," why testing isn't dying—but outdated testing roles are—and how AI is reshaping the future of software quality. In this episode: Why "The Death of Test Engineering" isn't what you think The difference between checking and testing Will AI replace software testers? Why confidence engineering matters How to communicate testing in business terms Where automation adds real value Why agentic AI testing is overhyped Notable Quotes "If you look at AI as a competitor, you're screwed. If you look at it as just another tool... it's not a threat." "Uncertainty in testing is a feature, not a bug." "If an organization doesn't value testing, you're doing it wrong." "You can be incredibly confident about something and incredibly wrong." One Thing to Try This Week Ask yourself after every critical defect: "What would the business impact have been if this had gone live?" It's a simple way to shift conversations from test cases to business risk. Resources Mentioned Rethinking Expertise — Harry Collins How Complex Systems Fail — Richard Cook Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations — Robert Austin Emily Bender Alex Hanna Timnit Gebru Dagmar Monett Olivia Gambelin Ed Zitron Joe's Recommendation: Prophecy
- 1 weeks ago36 min
AI Testing Strategy: Stop Being a Cost Center, Start Protecting Revenue with Nandini Srinivasan
Nandini Srinivasan has spent 25 years in the quality industry and leads a global QA organization of over 150 engineers across the US, Canada, India, and Pakistan. In this episode, she breaks down exactly how she built a QA AI acceleration charter, ran a train-the-trainer model, and used a phased proof-of-concept approach to separate real AI from what she calls "powerful automation dressed up as AI. We get into: How she frames quality metrics for executives Using language around revenue protection Risk mitigation Feature velocity instead of test coverage percentages. She talks about the four pillars she uses to present her team's value: quality, scalability, performance, and availability. Nandini also shares her take on the future of QA hiring, why the judgment layer will always require a human, and what skills testers need to stay relevant as AI agents take over the more mechanical parts of automation. She is also writing a five-part LinkedIn series called "The Voice of QA in the AI Era" if you want to follow along.
- 2 weeks ago39 min
How to Move from Prompt Engineering to Harness Engineering in Testing with Matt Wynne
Matt Wynne, co-creator of Cucumber and BDD practitioner, joins Joe for the first time in over a decade to talk about what two years inside a Silicon Valley AI startup taught him about the future of software testing. Matt spent time at Mechanical Orchard working alongside experienced XP practitioners to modernize legacy COBOL mainframes using LLMs, and then spent a week with the team that coined the term "software factory," where the rule was simple: humans never write the code, never read the code. In this episode, Matt breaks down what harness engineering actually means, why shared understanding is still the real bottleneck even in an agentic world, and how testers can use multiple LLMs to review AI-generated pull requests without reading every line. He also gets honest about the grief that comes with realizing you can encode years of hard-won expertise into a Markdown file, and why that does not mean your skills are worthless. If you are working in a brownfield codebase, wondering how to handle the flood of agentic PRs, or trying to figure out where testers fit in a world where agents write the code, this conversation is worth your time. Find Matt at: mattwynne.net leansoftware.ai Also check out his course: Build a Software Factory: Hands-off agentic coding for experienced engineers https://testgld.link/mattcourse
- 3 weeks ago43 min
Agentic Engineering for Testers: How to Automate Your Way to the Top with Amit Rawat
Amit Rawat is an agentic engineer who spent two decades in QA before shifting fully into building AI agents. He's the creator of PromptWright, a desktop tool that turns natural language prompts into automated Playwright browser tests, complete with screen recording, Gherkin scenario generation, and self-healing locators. In this episode, Amit and Joe get into what it actually takes to work with AI agents at a high level, starting with why the planning phase matters more than the prompt itself. Amit breaks down his own workflow, brainstorming with AI, building a detailed plan in HTML before ever executing, and why curiosity and technical depth still matter even as AI gets more capable. They also cover why Amit believes QA professionals, more than developers or DevOps engineers, are best positioned to thrive in the agentic era, how he tracks the ROI on his $200-a-month Claude subscription, the "Chief of Staff," "Chief Health Officer," and "Chief Financial Officer" AI agents he's built to help manage different aspects of his personal life, and how he uses a memory layer so those agents understand his preferences and become more useful over time. If you're a tester, automation engineer, or QA leader trying to figure out where AI agents fit into your workflow and your career, this conversation is a practical look at what's already working today.
- Jun 30, 202623 min
How to Test Any API Without Documentation with Liudas Jankauskas
Most API testing stops at the happy path. The problem is that the bugs that actually hurt you in production are sitting in everything many testers skip, like the boundary values, the oversized payloads, the missing tokens, the security headers, the inputs that make no sense at all. In this episode, Joe sits down with Liudas Jankauskas, who has spent almost twenty years breaking software and testing APIs since 2008. Liudas demonstrates Rentgen, his free and open-source API testing tool, live on screen. You'll watch him take a single request from a real app, map it in seconds, and generate dozens of tests covering security, boundaries, performance, and load—all from one click. You'll learn: How to discover APIs hiding under the hood of any application, even when there is zero documentation Why happy path testing leaves you exposed How to run a fast hygiene check before your real automation ever starts Liudas also explains why Rentgen runs completely locally with no server and no data leaving your machine, making it safe for banking, healthcare, and other regulated environments. Plus, he demonstrates the killer Copy Bug Report feature that drops a standards-based ticket straight into Jira or Trello. In This Episode You'll Discover How to find and test undocumented internal APIs using the browser DevTools Network tab Why happy path-only testing misses the bugs that matter most How Rentgen turns one request into security, boundary, performance, and load tests automatically Where Rentgen fits in your workflow as a pre-automation hygiene layer—not a Postman replacement How to use it for regression by comparing results across environments The one piece of advice Liudas gives every tester to level up their API testing Try Rentgen, free and open source, at Rentgen.io. Connect with Liudas Jankauskas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liudas-jankauskas/
- Jun 23, 202636 min
Your AI Code Review Is Lying to You (Here's the Fix) with Evan Marshall
Your AI code review tools read the diff. They stare at your code. But they never actually run it. So the bugs that only show up at runtime, the broken user flows, the bad query plan, the duplicate submission, sail right past review and land in front of your customers. In this episode, Joe Colantonio sits down with Evan Marshall, founder of Ito and a fifteen year engineer who spent five years in applied cryptography securing hundreds of millions of dollars for millions of people. Evan is taking that ship fast without breaking things discipline and pointing it straight at testing. Ito is an agentic QA platform that builds and runs your actual app on every pull request, navigates it like a real user, exercises the frontend and backend as one system, and brings back real runtime evidence: video replays, logs, the exact lines responsible, and steps to reproduce, posted right in your PR. You will learn: Why static code review misses the bugs that cause real production incidents How Ito spins up ephemeral environments and tests across UI, API, and database Why QA is not disappearing, it is leveling up into a manager and quality strategist role How to keep your test layer separate from your code generation so your signal stays honest The skills testers and engineers need as AI writes more of the code If you are shipping AI generated code at high velocity and your QA cannot keep up, this one is for you. Try Ito on your own code. Your first ten pull requests are reviewed free, no credit card required. Check it out at https://testgld.link/itoai now. And as Joe always says, seeing is believing.
- Jun 16, 202634 min
AI QA Agents Explained: How Amikoo Helps Testers with Ivan Barajas Vargas
What happens to QA when AI is writing ten times more code than your team can test? That is the exact problem Ivan Barajas Vargas set out to solve with Amikoo, a purpose-built AI QA agent designed to help testers, SDETs, and even developers move faster without sacrificing coverage or quality. Ivan is no stranger to AI in testing. Before generative AI became mainstream, he co-founded MuukTest, a test automation platform built on symbolic reasoning and expert systems. After six years and thousands of customer conversations, he went back to first principles to build Amikoo from scratch, this time with a harness of 12 specialized agents and 43 tools trained specifically for testing workflows. In this episode, Ivan and Joe dig into the real-world gap between AI code generation and AI-powered testing, why the QA role is being elevated rather than replaced, how Amikoo uses Playwright and page object model patterns under the hood, and where human judgment still has to stay in the loop. Ivan also shares practical advice on what skills QA engineers should be building right now and which test scenarios should never be fully delegated to an agent. If you are trying to figure out where testing fits in an agentic development world, this episode gives you a clear picture of what is possible today and what is coming next. Visit https://testgld.link/amikoo to try the freemium account, and mention you heard this on TestGuild to unlock double the free usage.
- Jun 9, 202616 min
The AI Illusion: Why Testing Still Needs Humans with Joe Colantonio
Everyone is talking about AI replacing testers, writing tests, and transforming software quality. But what if we're asking the wrong question? In this solo episode, Joe Colantonio shares a growing concern he's seen while traveling across the country for TestGuild IRL events: a decline in testing fundamentals at the exact moment AI hype is reaching a fever pitch. Drawing insights from Carissa Véliz's book Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, Wayne Roseberry's work on AI and meaning, and Tariq King's concept of Human Experience Testing, Joe explores why AI systems may be far less intelligent than many believe, and why human testers remain more important than ever. You'll discover: ✅ Why large language models generate plausible answers without understanding truth ✅ The difference between prediction, correlation, and genuine understanding ✅ Why AI can test software but cannot experience software ✅ What "Everything is tested, but nothing is experienced" really means ✅ How AI hype may be distracting teams from critical testing fundamentals ✅ Why empathy, context, and human judgment are becoming competitive advantages for testers Whether you're excited about AI, skeptical of it, or somewhere in between, this episode will challenge you to think more deeply about the future of testing and your role in it. Resources Mentioned 📖 Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future by Carissa Véliz 📖 Work and presentations by Wayne Roseberry 🎓 Free course: thebullshitmachines.com 🎤 Learn more about TestGuild IRL events: TestGuild.com/irl If you enjoy this episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a fellow tester who's trying to navigate the AI era without losing sight of the fundamentals. #SoftwareTesting #AI #QualityEngineering #TestAutomation #SoftwareQuality #HumanExperienceTesting #ArtificialIntelligence #TestGuild #QA #TechPodcast
Get TestGuild Automation Podcast summaries in your inbox
Free AI-powered daily recaps. Key takeaways, quotes, and mentions — in a 5-minute read.
Get Free Summaries →Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.
You Might Also Like
Listeners also like.
Everyday AI Podcast – An AI and ChatGPT Podcast
Practical AI and ChatGPT tips for professionals to improve productivity and grow their careers.
This Day in AI Podcast
Two friends discuss artificial intelligence, sharing casual insights, personal experiments, and humorous experiences with AI tools and technology.
The AI in Business Podcast
Executives discuss practical AI adoption in business through interviews focused on strategy, use-cases, and ROI.
How I AI
A practical guide to using AI tools in work and life, featuring guests who share specific, actionable techniques and workflows.
Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
Covers advances in AI engineering, including foundation models, code generation, and AI agents, through interviews with researchers and developers.
OpenAI Podcast
Conversations with OpenAI researchers and builders exploring how frontier AI models are developed and used in practice.
AI For Humans: Weekly AI News, Tools & Trends
A weekly breakdown of major AI news, tools, and breakthroughs for both newcomers and seasoned enthusiasts.
Primary Technology
Tech news covering consumer gadgets, AI, and major industry stories explained for a general audience.
The Digital Executive
A daily tech podcast exploring emerging technologies through interviews with Silicon Valley CEOs, influencers, and celebrities.
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Conversations with top product and growth leaders offering practical strategies for building, launching, and scaling successful products.
Whiskey Web and Whatnot
Developers discuss web technologies, AI coding tools, and software careers alongside casual talk about the human side of programming.
The Cloud Pod | Weekly AI & Cloud News on AWS, Azure & GCP
Covers weekly updates and AI innovations in cloud computing across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud for tech professionals.
About TestGuild Automation Podcast
TestGuild Automation Podcast (formally Test Talks) is a weekly podcast hosted by Joe Colantonio, which geeks out on all things software test automation. TestGuild Automation covers news found in the testing space, reviews books about automation, and speaks with some of the thought leaders in the test automation field. We'll aim to interview some of today's most successful and inspiring software engineers, and test automation thought leaders.
Customized Recaps
AI-powered recaps with compact key takeaways, quotes, and insights.
Straight to Your Inbox
Get key takeaways from TestGuild Automation Podcast in a 5-minute read.
Save Hours Every Week
Stay current on your favorite podcasts without falling behind.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Podzilla's TestGuild Automation Podcast daily summary?
It's a free AI-powered email that summarizes new episodes of TestGuild Automation Podcast as soon as they're published. You get the key takeaways, notable quotes, and links & mentions — all in a quick read.
How does the TestGuild Automation Podcast podcast summary work?
When a new episode drops, our AI transcribes and analyzes it, then generates a personalized summary tailored to your interests and profession. It's delivered to your inbox every morning.
Is this an official TestGuild Automation Podcast product?
No. Podzilla is an independent service that summarizes publicly available podcast content. We're not affiliated with or endorsed by Joe Colantonio.
Can I get summaries of other podcasts too?
Absolutely! The free plan covers up to 3 podcasts. Upgrade to Pro for 15, or Premium for 50. Browse our full catalog at /podcasts.
How often does TestGuild Automation Podcast release new episodes?
TestGuild Automation Podcast publishes weekly. Our AI generates a summary within hours of each new episode.
What topics does TestGuild Automation Podcast cover?
TestGuild Automation Podcast covers topics including Technology, Education, How To. Our AI identifies the specific themes in each episode and highlights what matters most to you.
Start getting TestGuild Automation Podcast summaries tomorrow morning.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.