Remote profile

The conference gave me two huge packages of local premium chocolate. I found two people who turned out to work at university on student systems and traded chocolate for new friends.

Yep, allergic to chocolate but loving the new friends this has made me.

If a goal of a consultant is to stay in invoicable work though satisfied clients, the fact your assignements end while they say they are happy with you might need to say something. Sure, there is work that just ends. But that’s already rules out when observing this.

Thinking through expectations of results and value of testing. When we can happily have 40 easily discoverable bugs on a testing conference website without blinking an eye, where really is that value of testing, particularly testers?

The value promise of testers isn't that developers leave pizza boxes in middle of the floor for you to point at, while dust collecting in the corners means nothing.

I see good work in the space, but why does what I consider good work appear to be an exception, and yet we do nothing?

Adding more people to the sample set of interviews well, until given something to test and automation to look at - kind of core of a tester role - to note they have no idea what to do.

At the same time there are a lot of people free and looking, and not enough people who have a solid idea of what they are doing.

In preparation for a keynote talk tomorrow morning, I again tested the conference website:

- 5 min attended - asking for what I wanted done from agents, and reproducing most interesting problems found

- 25 minutes unattended - working with a paid client while the testing was being done

Every single time I do this, I stop to think about what do we really do with the time when AI runs a job for us.

The time isn't saved. It's used on learning. Helping others. Thinking about next steps. Starting next steps. Deciding on criteria of calling things done when recognizing done is at the center of actions. We do more, and new kinds of things.

The conditions for client(s) actually saving time with AI need a whole lot more changes in the way the work is organized.

The things people do with Rovo and Xray AI are workslop. Appearance of work, without thinking and deciding on what this plan should really look like and why. They don’t even build a transformation track, just random generated artifacts.

I really believe the good things are all with dev environment integrations that turn things to actions not artifacts. Remember the testing as performance vs artifact creation? That really is visible for not being able to trust ‘manual testers’ with real tools.

On another note, my firstborn is about to move out for studies. He got accepted to study in a different city so I’m living through quite a change.

At conference last week, one of the keynotes was on a company the speaker was no longer at. Is it just me who assumed that representing a company (Tesla) from stage kind of would require you to be still employed there? Or at least riding on ex-employee status would be somewhat risky, both for the speaker and the conference organizers.

Significant number of colleagues are now seeking next assignments since remote work is no longer the approach. Hiring becoming more location-based again.

I suppose it’s nicer to be in this position while employed by consultancy that makes its money from keeping y’all assigned across a lot of clients. Sometimes the services of finding your next thing feel valuable.

Someone was happy with me today at work.

First, because I showed initiative and proposed a new thing.

Second, because the new thing I proposed turned a passive client into an active scheduler where they would want to make agreements on next steps.

[Blog] Ideation and Oracles - Where AI does Better than Testers

https://visible-quality.blogspot.com/2026/10/ideation-and-oracles-where-ai-does.html