Testing: harder, better, faster, stronger?
BREWTCON, 7 November 2025
Joep Schuurkes
Staff Test Engineer
Dutch Electoral Council
agenda
opening thoughts
three roles
closing thoughts
all of this is based on
my experiences
other people's stories
my career (so far)
waterfall tester (2006 - 2014)
agile/devops tester (2013 - 2016; 2023 - now)
scrum master; development team lead (2016 - 2018)
quality engineer (2018 - now)
roles I never had
SDET
test automationer
performance tester
pen tester
test manager
The future is unevenly distributed.
- William Gibson
what it was like
handover all the things
test team
2-3 rounds of testing
test cases
bug reports and test reports
tech skills are optional
the one where
I got to sit next to a developer
the one where
I asked about buffering
the one where
defect 42 was still open
the one where
only technical testers knew SQL
recap
silos of sequential steps
not involed in design, code, prod
weeks to prep, weeks to test
you produce bug reports and test reports
harder, better, faster, stronger
very siloed
lots of friction
slow tempo
narrow skill set
what it was like
cross-functional team
devs deliver better work
the "testing"-column
access implies tech skills
the one where
I had to 'git clone' and 'vagrant up'
the one where
someone reviewed my code
the one where
my bug report became a bug fix
the one where
we reverted to waterfall (kind of)
recap
specialist in a cross-functional team
sprints and CI/CD
refinement, operations, retrospectives
code, test automation, pipelines
harder, better, faster, stronger
many more things to do
more collaborative
faster pace
wider and deeper skill set
two different flavors
staff/principal test engineer
quality engineer
what it was like
supporting others
focus on quality
figuring out the work is part of the work
the one where
the testers got together to ensemble
the one where
I dove into the data
the one where
we wanted stable releases
recap
"How can I help?" "How can you help?"
no one knows what you do,
but they agree you should keep doing it
harder, better, faster, stronger
vague, floaty, loosey-goosey
devs should build and test
multiple timescales
coaching and advising skills
harder, better, faster, stronger
testing got harder
software development got better
delivery got faster
we need to be stronger
dynamics on three axes
do testing yourself — support testing by others
be embedded in a team — be part of a separate team
do your job — improve the system
what does the future hold?
more of the same
the future is unevenly distributed
it's an unsolved problem
an unsolved problem
specialization and collaboration
it's like writing a book together as a team
pick your kind of broken
testing is opaque
poorly understood by non-testers
few testers in positions of power
quality is emergent
(Anne-Marie Charrett)
so we do operate in the gaps
we don't have a good story
ask five testers what good testing isand you get six opinions
the bar in testing is low/unknown
software communities are silos
shape your own role
few people have a clue
learn what you can dream of
you can take small steps
You can change your organisation or you can change your organisation.
- Martin Fowler