TestGuild Automation Podcast

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

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.

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

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.

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/