Our Berlin QA community got together again for what was actually our 10th meetup. Ten evenings of talking about quality, risk, weird edge cases, all about the beautiful work of setting order in messiness.
I keep saying this, but it is still true every time. I am really happy to see how this community keeps showing up for these conversations. People stay late, ask hard questions, and bring experience from very different kinds of teams and domains. It makes the whole thing feel less like “talks” and more like an ongoing discussion within the community.
As usual, we had three talks.
The Ethical Product: Balancing Innovation, Quality and Integrity
Our VP of Product, Glen Holmes, opened the evening with a topic I care a lot: ethics. I do believe we don't talk enough about this in our day to day work. Pretty much always we only ask “can we build this” or “how fast can we ship it”, but very rarely “should we build this at all”.
For me, ethics should act as a guide, a compass that helps us move towards eudaimonia, helping us live a better and happier life, individually and collectively. If we don’t have any kind of ethical code, how do we decide when it’s time to raise a concern, or when it’s time to say no? Can we rely only on economics as the main mode of reasoning? If yes, how do we connect economics to ethics so we don’t end up in a tragedy-of-the-commons situation? If not, where and how should ethics constrain the economic story we tell ourselves?
These are the kinds of questions I think we should spend more time with.
Quality at the End Is Already Lost
Anna shared a good story about how a lack of understanding of how QA actually works, and of basic queuing theory, can hurt the quality of any system; whether it’s a new airport terminal or a software product.
The overall message was simple but important: if you treat QA as a safety net at the end, you have already lost. You need to build a production system where quality is created on purpose at every stage, not just “tested for” at the end.
And to be able to design such a system, you need some solid theoretical background. After all, nothing is quite so practical as a good theory.
Testing Mobile Analytics for Confident Product Decisions
Evgenii closed the evening with a very practical topic that still gets underestimated in many teams: how to test product analytics in mobile apps so that people can actually trust the data. The reason for the underestimation is simple: analytics often is perceived as booooring. But good product decisions are made with data, and data requires analytics, and analytics must work, and work extremely reliably. Otherwise the data can’t be trusted, and the quality of product decisions won’t be far from guessing and hoping.
Evgenii shared how he builds and tests analytics, but what I particularly liked is that he framed analytics testing as a collaboration topic, not one person’s hidden responsibility. Developers, QA, product, and data people all need to agree on what “good enough” looks like for events, and how to make sure analytics data stays trustworthy over time.
Thanks to everyone who came, asked questions, and stayed to talk afterwards.
Thanks to Glen, Anna and Evgenii for preparing and sharing their talks.
These meetups are for you, my dear community. If you want to speak, or if you are thinking about your first talk and not sure where to start, come talk to me. I am happy to help you get there.
See you at the next one in 2026!
