While spring was in full bloom in Berlin, we gathered once again for our Quality Engineering meetup. The meetup had to compete with some seriously beautiful weather, but that didn’t stop a crowd from showing up. I love it when people choose conversations about quality over beers — or better yet, squeeze in both 🙂
People vs Processes: How to Survive, Influence, and Improve Quality
Alexander Ptakhin opened the evening with a talk that resonated with many of us: the impact of poorly designed processes on quality assurance. From siloed planning to asynchronous dependencies, queues and bottlenecks, Alexander shared examples that felt all too familiar: long wait times that create bottlenecks, especially for testers.
This overload doesn’t just delay releases — it damages the efficiency of testing itself. I’ve seen the same thing across multiple teams and organisations. And I completely agree with Alexander’s call: engineers — developers and testers alike — should also test how their processes affect their own output, and whenever bugs in processes are found, fix them.
Shift-Left. Move Forward
Shift-left is one of those phrases that’s often repeated but rarely explored in real depth, and Anupam gave it the treatment it deserves!
He told a story of a team which inherited a "modest" (if not bad) test pipeline: 3 hours to run, a month-long recovery from a failed external API, and no ownership over failures. After some serious shifting testing left, pipeline runtime dropped to minutes while recovery time went from 172 hours to 4.
One example stayed with me: the story of Toyota’s famous ‘100% snap fit’ — where the car could be disassembled and assembled back without a hammer. A Ford manager who saw this famously said: ‘Customers won’t notice.’ But Toyota wasn’t doing it to impress customers. This was simply a result of QA improvements to their development process, which proved that high quality allows for fast, cheap, and reliable production. That’s the deeper value of building quality in — not just speed, but systemic — and competitive — leverage.
Beyond Software: Testing the Systems That Move the World
Taras took us on a journey into a world few software testers experience: the world of rail automation.
In most industries, a test failure might mean a delay or a bug fix. In railway software, it can mean accidents, legal investigations, or even fatalities. That’s why quality here isn’t negotiable — it’s embedded in certification requirements before the product even ships.
Taras walked us through the structure behind this level of assurance: safety standards like EN 50126/28/29, criticality levels for every system component, and rigorous traceability between requirements and test cases. Full system simulations include real GSM-R communication, track logic, and on-board train software — not faked, but tested with production configurations. Digital twins are common. Fault injection is expected. And when simulation isn’t enough, engineers test live — at night, in bad weather, on moving trains.
It was a humbling reminder of what ‘quality’ really means in safety-critical systems — and how much we can learn from those who build when failure is not an option.
The QA Negotiations Quest: Survive Your Leader’s Mood Swings
We closed the evening with something new — a short, interactive workshop led by Veronika Ilina, a dungeon master and communication coach.
Participants stepped into high-stakes workplace scenarios — asking for a raise, proposing new tooling — and had to navigate unpredictable reactions from their fictional ‘boss’ (I was this evil boss, yes). The playful format quickly turned serious, surfacing real lessons about negotiation, empathy, and organisational change.
More than tactics, the workshop demonstrated this: change isn’t logical, it’s emotional. If you want to improve processes, tooling, or pay — you need to understand the humans behind the systems. You need to ask what they care about. And you need to build trust before pushing change.
Quality, as always, begins with people.
See you at the next meetup in Berlin on 12th June!
Please follow our Quality Engineering Meetup Berlin group to hear about upcoming meetups in Berlin. We’ll also be experimenting with new cities around Europe — follow us on LinkedIn to be the first to hear about new locations.
