The Quality Trail: August 2025 QA News
From the Desk of the Editor
Welcome to the August edition of The Quality Trail. This month, we’re covering everything from upcoming conferences that bring together the brightest minds in testing, to new research on AI’s role across industries, to thought-provoking takes on how automation is reshaping quality work. Whether you’re curious about where AI fits into your testing strategy or just looking for your next event to attend, you’ll find something worth your time.
– The QualityLogic Editorial Team
What’s Inside
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Conferences & Events
- The TestMu Conference, put on by LambdaTest, will take place online from August 19 – 21 2025. It’s one of the biggest events of its type, featuring over 50000 testers from 120 countries and some highly sought after speakers. Registrations are free, and still open.
- The Conference Association for Software Testing (CAST) will be in Salt Lake city, Utah from August 25 – 27 2025. This event sets itself apart by establishing a community of people willing and ready to challenge the status quo, come up with new ideas, and learn from one another.
AI in QA
On July 10, Microsoft research published a paper called Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI, an empirical look at which jobs are most and least susceptible to automation via large language models. The data was gathered by analyzing 200,000 real world conversations that users had with Microsoft Copilot.
Most likely jobs include things like interpreters and translators, historians, customer service representatives, programmers, ticket agents and travel clerks, broadcast announcers and radio DJs, telemarketers, news analysists and reporters, teachers, and researchers. The most unlikely? Phlebotomists, painters, plasterers, massage therapists, roofers, equipment operators, and project supervisors, just to name a few.
QA remains conspicuously absent from both the “most-at-risk” and “safest” lists, underscoring a fact that anyone specializing in quality (specifically in automation) knows well. Quality work sits at a unique intersection between both the human and the machine.
Research papers only tell part of the story. Deep in the trenches, seasoned testers are already wrestling with the practical and sometimes uncomfortable realities of AIpowered tooling. The essence of quality assurance is determining whether systems behave as intended for the humans that will use them. A Forbes article, Manual Testing Meets AI: The Future Of Quality Assurance, argues that what we’re seeing is history repeating itself as a sort of resurgence of the .com bubble, where QA was overlooked in the name of speed, leading to the collapse of countless promising tech companies.
On LinkedIn, testing thought-leader Brijesh Deb reminds us that hype is not a strategy: “Everyone’s chasing AI, automation, and shiny tools. But ask yourself this when was the last time your testing strategy was shaped by how your users actually experience your product?”
Acceptance criteria are great, but only when connected to *actual* user journeys and experiences. There’s a good chance that GenAI isn’t going to fully catch on in that respect.
Regardless, the future of QA is AI. If there is one thing we’ve really learned from the successes and failures here at QualityLogic and other companies we work with, balance is key. Not enough AI? You risk falling behind and losing ground to the competition. Too much AI? You lose the human element. Jason Arbon (Testers.ai) and Philip Lew (XBOSoft.com) recently did a fantastic webinar that touches on this in more detail, entitled Is AI Eating Your QA? The Critical Replay Every Leader Needs to See!
Here are some of the other AI-related posts that caught our eye this month:
- Jason Arbon shares the names of four people/concepts that are actually “reassessing their thinking and thought leadership in light of AI’s rapid impact”
- How to get started generating AI test cases, Agents, and Reports using TestersAI
- AI-Powered Test Generation and Maintenance – Peyman Iravani (Medium)
- QA in the Age of AI: More Than Just Survival – Yash Patil (Medium)
- Long live the human tester: QA in a post-AI world – Dev Pro Journel
- Why I’m Betting on LLMs for UI Testing
- Where Does AI Fit in the Future of Software Testing?
- Testing AI-coded applications: Practical tips for software testers – Ministry of Testing
- Using Playwright MCP with Claude Code – Simon Willison’s TILs
- Rethinking Test Data: AI’s Role in Modern Integrated Application Testing – The Test Mage (Medium)
What We’ve Been Reading
- Bug in Production – If QA Can’t Be Blamed, Why Do We Have QA?: A LinkedIn post with an important message: “If QA professionals want to stop being treated as an afterthought, the way forward isn’t to deflect, it’s to own.”
- Test smart: how to escape burnout? – Julia Kocbek (UxDesign)
- Why QA Is More Than Just Testing in Agile Projects – Bhavanandhan Radhakrishnan (Medium)
- What’s Next in QA? A Complete Guide to Career Growth – by Mona M. Abd El-Rahman (QualityNexus – Medium)
- Overcoming the trap of intellectual conformity: Tips for software – Ministry of Testing
- Testing in Production – Scott Logic’s blog
- From self-doubt to growth: My unusual journey into software testing – Ministry of Testing
- Bug vs Feature: The Never-Ending Debate – Kalpesh Chavan (NonstopIO)
- Demystifying async/await in JS for Playwright Testers – Sourojit Das (JavaScript in Plain English)
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