Into The MoTaverse

Stephen Platten is a principal consultant at Inspire Testing, a MoTaverse ambassador, and the writer behind LinkedIn's "The Stoic Tester." A former Royal Air Force engineer who spent over a decade on fast jets before moving into trials, evaluation, and validation work, Stephen went on to lead test delivery at Yorkshire Water, work as a chapter lead at Admiral Insurance, and now consults across qua...

Adriana Vilela is a Principal Developer Advocate at Dynatrace and a core contributor to OpenTelemetry, the open source standard for instrumenting applications that has become one of the highest-velocity projects in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. In this episode, Adriana and Rosie trace the arc of long careers in tech, from Java development in the early 2000s to the current age of AI-assist...

Abby Bangser is a principal founding engineer at Syntasso, a CNCF ambassador, and a Team Topologies advocate. She started her career in QA and has spent two decades working in internal tooling, DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering. Always with quality at the centre. In this episode, Rosie and Abby explore platform engineering through a quality lens. They cover what it actually means to treat a pl...

Adam Davis is a software engineering manager who spends his spare hours building pixelmesh . It’s a system that turns a room full of phones into a single coordinated light display, inspired by the glowing wristbands at Coldplay concerts. In this episode he walks through the engineering, the testing, and the hard-won lessons from demoing it live at the Manchester MoTaverse chapter meetup. The conve...

There's a version of this story where Preeti Gupta questions her future in quality. Where the months of silence from employers, the CVs filtered by bots, or the well-meaning advice to retrain or change direction. That's not this story. Preeti has seventeen years in quality engineering. But there’s more than that, she's someone who has genuinely put in the work. She's shown up at chapter events. Sh...

Coding has accelerated. Everything else hasn't. In this episode, Rosie talks with Dan Faulkner, CEO of SmartBear, about what happens when one part of the software development lifecycle runs ahead and leaves the rest behind. It's a conversation that will resonate with anyone in quality, security, design, or DevOps who's felt the pressure of more software arriving faster, with the same size team and...

Rahul Parwal is a MoTaverse Ambassador, MoTaCon speaker, and Masterclass contributor, course creator, and so much more! In this episode he joins Rosie to talk through what it actually looks like to level up with AI as a quality professional. They cover where to start (primary sources, not social media hype), how to build consistency through community, and why the thirty days of AI and testing spri...

Rosie Sherry is joined by Amy Phillips, a senior engineering manager with a career spanning test consultancy, startup life, and leading infrastructure and product teams. Amy reflects on what's stayed constant across fifteen years of change (it’s the people!) and what's shifted dramatically. They dig into the tension between process and creativity, why removing things matters as much as building th...

Tristan Lombard, marketer, community builder, ghost author, and self-described Stage Mom, joins Rosie Sherry to talk about one of the most pressing questions in tech right now: what do you do when the traditional career path stops working for you? Drawing on three years of solopreneurship and a decade of community-building before that, Tristan makes a compelling, data-backed, and deeply human case...

Rosie Sherry sits down with Paul Reinheimer, co-founder of WonderProxy , for a wide-ranging founder-to-founder conversation that goes well beyond localization testing. Paul shares the origin story of WonderProxy, which was born out of a favour to a friend stuck testing websites with dodgy free proxies, and reflects on what it means to build a company slowly and deliberately over two decades, turni...

Join Rosie Sherry and Dan Moore (developer, former DevRel lead, and now Senior Director of CIAM Strategy at FusionAuth) for an honest conversation about what it actually means to navigate a tech career that just won’t hold still. Dan's own path, from developer to CTO to DevRel to identity standards strategist, is less a career ladder and more a career stack. Each layer built on the last, shaped by...

In this episode of Into the MoTaverse, Rosie Sherry sits down with Susanne Abdelrahman for a conversation that keeps circling back to one quietly powerful idea: influencing without authority. Susanne traces how this skill born out of the structural reality of being a tester, where you can't simply tell developers their code needs to meet a certain bar, became the defining thread of her career as s...

It was such a pleasure to have Alan Page on Into the MoTaverse. Alan is a titan in the testing community, known for his work at Microsoft, his "Modern Testing" principles, and the AB Testing podcast. We caught up on his recent 3,000-mile hike of the Pacific Crest Trail and how that "slow mode" gave him a fresh perspective on a tech world that is moving faster than ever. The heart of the conversati...

In this episode of Into the MoTaverse , Rosie Sherry sits down with QA Team Lead Megan Ozanne to tackle the Heffalump in the room: the relentless pressure to move faster in an AI-driven industry. Megan shares a poignant analogy from Winnie the Pooh to illustrate how teams are rushing into automation and AI-generated requirements without stopping to ask the most fundamental question—why? They explo...

In this episode of Into the MoTaverse , Rosie Sherry sits down with Andrew Easter, Co-Founder and CTO of Claimer, to discuss the turbulent but rewarding journey of scaling and pivoting a tech startup. Andrew shares the adjustment of transitioning Claimer from a 30-person tech-enabled consultancy to a lean, 11-person pure software business. He provides a transparent look at the human cost of restru...

As AI begins to act as a massive productivity multiplier for individual developers, engineering leaders are facing a widening disconnect between rapid code generation and the human-centric processes that ensure its quality. This episode explores hidden friction created when technical output outpaces a team’s ability to plan, test, and communicate effectively. It challenges the assumption that fast...

In this episode of Into the MoTaverse , Rosie Sherry sits down with quality engineer and MoTaverse ambassador Judy Mosley to discuss her unconventional path into tech and the realities of being a "lone tester." Judy reflects on her transition from a stay-at-home mom to a tech professional, highlighting how seeing relatable, authentic women in leadership gave her the permission to lead as her true...

In this episode of Into the MoTaverse, Rosie Sherry speaks with Shawn Vernier, a quality advocate based in Canada, about his journey from software developer to quality engineer and his evolving perspective on testing, automation, and product quality. Sean shares how his curiosity and excitement of asking “why?” led him toward quality engineering. Together, they expand the MoTaverse by exploring: T...

In this episode of Into the MoTaverse, Rosie Sherry sits down with Brazilian testing leader Julio de Lima to explore the evolution of software testing across borders. Julio shares his journey from developer to educator, training over 22,000 testers in Brazil, and reflects on how language barriers, limited resources, and community growth shaped his career. Together, they compare the Brazilian and U...

In this episode of Into the MoTaverse , Rosie Sherry catches up with long-time friend and community member Kim Knup to explore her journey from tester to internal DevRel Manager at Legal & General. Together they unpack platform engineering, communities of practice, quality as care, and what it really means to grow your career without losing your roots. Key Takeaways: Career growth isn’t always...

In this episode, Rosie Sherry sits down with Nataliia Burmei to talk candidly about navigating today’s tech job market, building confidence in leadership roles, and redefining what quality really means. Nataliia shares her recent experience of what brought on the the decision of making the brave move of leaving a role without a new one to go to. Together they explored refining CVs and building tan...

This conversation between Rosie Sherry, founder of Ministry of Testing, and Chris Miles, Head of Platform Engineering at Legal & General, explores the evolving landscape of quality engineering. With over 25 years in the field, Chris shares how a "testing mindset" serves as a foundation for leadership and why the future of quality lies in communication, language, and the democratization of tech...

What happens when you stop seeing software testing as a "quality gate" and start seeing it as a creative loop? In this episode of Into the MoTaverse, we sit down with Luke Lattimer-Rogers, a seasoned quality lead with over 14 years of experience across fashion, gaming, and even prison software. Luke challenges the traditional delineation between science and art, arguing that coding and QA are fund...

In this episode of Into the MoTaverse , host Rosie Sherry is joined by Simon Tomes to pull back the curtain on the evolution of the Ministry of Testing, aka The MoTaverse. They dive into the idea of Community as a Service (CaaS) and how it becomes so much more powerful to offer many different opportunities for their people under the banner of CaaS. Community is everywhere, everything is intertwine...

"I can't believe it hasn't even been a year!" What has felt like years of knowing Eamon, in reality it has been less than a year. This partly shows the power of the people, but also what is possible in community. We're launching our new podcast Into the MoTaverse, hosted by Rosie Sherry and our first guest had to be Eamon Droko. As we were chatting, and as I was scrolling through his MoT Profile I...