Podcast
TestGuild Automation Podcast
Hosted by Joe Colantonio · EN
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.
26episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
How to Test Any API Without Documentation with Liudas Jankauskas
6d ago00:23:22Tap to summarizeMost 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/
Transcribe →Your AI Code Review Is Lying to You (Here's the Fix) with Evan Marshall
2w ago00:36:12Tap to summarizeYour 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.
Transcribe →AI QA Agents Explained: How Amikoo Helps Testers with Ivan Barajas Vargas
3w ago00:34:37Tap to summarizeWhat 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.
Transcribe →The AI Illusion: Why Testing Still Needs Humans with Joe Colantonio
4w ago00:16:05Tap to summarizeEveryone 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
Transcribe →AI Agents in QA: How to Keep Up with AI-Driven Dev Velocity with Vilhelm von Ehrenheim
Jun 200:35:23Tap to summarizeAI coding tools promised to make development faster — and they delivered. But here's the problem nobody talks about enough: when you speed up coding, you don't eliminate the bottleneck in the SDLC. You just move it. And for most teams, it lands squarely in QA. In this episode, Joe sits down with Vilhelm von Ehrenheim, Co-founder and Chief AI Officer of QA.tech, to dig into how agentic AI is reshaping software testing from the ground up. Vilhelm brings serious ML credibility, he helped build Motherbrain, one of the earliest production LLM systems in venture capital, and he's now applying that experience to one of the hardest problems in software delivery: testing at AI development velocity. You'll learn how QA.tech's behavioral knowledge graph gives AI agents the context they need to actually understand your application, why validating user intent beats checking element identifiers every time, how autonomous agents can review PRs, reproduce bugs from Slack messages, and generate targeted tests without a single line of test code ,and what the tester's role actually looks like when agents do the heavy lifting. If you're wondering whether your QA practice can survive the pace of AI-driven development, this one's required listening. 🔗 Book a demo now: https://testgld.link/qatechdemo
Transcribe →Maestro MCP, AI Mobile Testing That Fixes Its Own Tests with Leland Takamine
May 1900:38:10Tap to summarizeWhat happens when AI agents can not only write mobile app code, but also validate their own work automatically? In this episode, I sit down with Maestro Co-founder and CEO Leland Takamine to explore one of the biggest shifts happening in software testing right now: agentic mobile testing. Leland shares how his team went from solving mobile performance testing challenges to building one of the fastest-growing mobile automation frameworks used by companies like Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and DoorDash. We dive deep into: How AI coding agents are changing mobile testing workflows What "closing the agentic feedback loop" actually means Why deterministic testing still matters in the age of AI How Maestro MCP lets AI agents validate mobile app changes automatically Why mobile test maintenance may finally become manageable The future role of testers as AI-generated code explodes Leland also gives a live demo showing an AI agent building, validating, debugging, and generating a reusable mobile test completely autonomously. If you care about AI testing, mobile automation, MCP servers, or the future of QA engineering, this episode will likely change how you think about testing workflows over the next few years. Try it out now for yourself: Maestro Studio: https://testgld.link/mstudio Maestro MCP docs: https://testgld.link/maestromcp
Transcribe →AI Testing Costs, How to Prevent Runaway Token Bills with Arthur Hicken
May 1200:38:39Tap to summarizeAI-powered testing tools are exploding across software engineering teams… but so are the hidden costs. In this episode, Joe sits down with Arthur Hicken to unpack the growing problem of runaway AI token usage, unexpected LLM billing, and the operational risks of deploying AI agents into testing and DevOps pipelines. Inspired by Arthur's article on the emerging "Token Tax," this conversation explores why many teams are underestimating the true cost of AI automation. You'll learn: Why AI-generated testing can create unexpected scaling costs How runaway AI agents and infinite loops happen Real-world examples of massive AI billing surprises Why deterministic problems shouldn't always use LLMs The hidden risks of "vibe testing" and autonomous AI remediation How QA teams can monitor, test, and control token usage Why performance testing and service virtualization matter more than ever in AI systems Practical strategies to avoid expensive AI deployment mistakes Whether you're a software tester, automation engineer, QA leader, or DevOps practitioner, this episode will help you think more strategically about AI testing before costs spiral out of control.
Transcribe →Stop Rewriting Tests: How to Add AI to Selenium and Playwright Without Starting Over with Alex Rodionov
May 500:30:23Tap to summarizeAI-powered testing tools promise faster automation and less maintenance, but most require teams to abandon their existing frameworks. In this episode, we explore Alumnium, an opensource AI-native end-to-end testing solution created by Alex Rodionov, an engineer at Airbnb and a tech lead on the Selenium project. Instead of replacing tools like Playwright or Selenium, Alumnium adds an AI layer on top, helping teams: Reduce test maintenance by removing brittle locators Build more resilient, self-healing tests Write less code while increasing coverage Run tests across web and mobile using intent-based steps We also go beyond the hype and break down what actually matters for real teams: Why AI-driven tests can still become flaky The performance and cost tradeoffs of LLM-based execution What "context rot" is—and how it impacts long test runs How to safely introduce AI into existing test suites without rewriting everything Check it out now: https://testguild.me/alumAI
Transcribe →Claude AI Mobile Testing, Run Real Device Tests with AI with Frank Moyer and Chris Faulhaber
Apr 2800:31:00Tap to summarizeAI is changing how we build and test software, but most teams are still struggling to turn AI-generated tests into real production value. Use code TESTGUILD3 try for yourself free now for 3 months: https://links.testguild.com/Kobiton In this episode, we break down what actually works when it comes to AI-powered mobile test automation, especially when running tests on real devices not simulators from Claude. You'll learn: How teams are generating and running Appium tests using natural language in minutes Why AI-generated tests often fail—and how to avoid costly false positives The real impact of AI on test automation roles and responsibilities How real device testing exposes issues AI alone can't catch Practical ways to reduce test maintenance while increasing coverage We also explore a major shift happening right now: AI is making it easier to create tests—but dramatically increasing the volume of code and risk that needs to be validated. That means one thing: Testing isn't going away—it's becoming more critical than ever. If you're a QA engineer, automation engineer, or DevOps leader trying to keep up with AI-driven development, this episode will give you a clear, practical perspective on what to focus on next.
Transcribe →AI Testing Is Breaking Your Pipeline. Fix Quality Before It's Too Late with Eric Minick
Apr 1500:29:38Tap to summarizeAI coding tools are helping teams move faster than ever, but there's a hidden cost. In this episode, we break down new insights from a DevOps industry report revealing a growing "velocity paradox": teams are shipping more code, but experiencing more failures, rollbacks, and burnout. You'll discover why AI adoption is heavily skewed toward coding, but not testing, pipelines, or observability, and how that imbalance is creating fragile systems that break under pressure. More importantly, you'll learn what high-performing teams are doing differently to maintain quality while scaling speed. What You'll Discover: ✔️ Why AI is increasing deployment failures (and how to stop it) ✔️ The "velocity vs quality" trap hurting modern DevOps teams ✔️ How to reduce flaky tests and pipeline instability ✔️ Why observability and feature flags are now critical, not optional ✔️ Practical ways to improve your CI/CD pipeline for AI-driven development ✔️ The role of QA engineers in the age of AI (and why it's growing, not shrinking) If you're a tester, automation engineer, or DevOps leader trying to keep up
Transcribe →