Observatory Weekly: The difference a year makes, keeping the testing boundaries,

In The Observatory, the MoTaverse community shows up to share links they are reading all the time.

The value is not only in the links shared in the moment, but also in the accumulation of links that become searchable knowledge over time.

There are currently 2870 searchable links.

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🎉 Featured link of the week:

What a Difference a Year Makes — Susanne Abdelrahman

About a week ago I was cleaning out my Notes app (I've self-diagnosed as an information hoarder) and found one from October 2019 that listed public speaking as a skill I needed to work on "that also low-key terrified me", with a to-do list below laddering up to an ultimate goal of giving a talk at a conference. I read it and thought: holy shit. It really happened.

15 links from the Observatory this week:

Organise teams around value, then keep testing the boundaries — Rob Morrey

How engineering leaders can identify customer and internal value, track whether teams are improving it, and recognise when ownership no longer matches the work

The 3 product battles 84% of EMs lose — Anton Zaides

"PMs decide what, engineers decide how" is a bad deal

Agentic Code Quality Quality now depends on the constraints you set around your agents. — Addy Osmani

Quality now depends on the constraints you set around your agents.

ailments - a field guide to potential AI-induced cognitive-behavioural disorders — Information is Beautiful

Generative AI isn’t just changing how we work. It’s may also be affecting how we think, create, collaborate, procrastinate, and occasionally lose the plot.

You may have heard of AI Mania and AI Psychosis.

Here’s a field guide to more potential AI-induced mental habits, compulsions and behavioural quirks that may be emerging in the age of AI.

None are recognised medical conditions.

Many might feel uncomfortably familiar.

Best Service Virtualization Tools for Enterprise Testing — Parasoft

This guide compares leading service virtualization and API mocking tools by features, benefits, disadvantages, and pricing so teams can evaluate which option best fits their testing environment.

The agentic coding ladder is a list of things you give up — Jed Arden

Steve Yegge has a framework I keep coming back to: eight levels of AI-assisted development, from “no AI” up to “build your own orchestrator.” It reads the climb by trust — how much of the machine’s output you’ll accept without looking. Permissions on, permissions off, stop reading diffs, abandon the IDE, run a fleet. It’s a genuinely good way to find where you stand, and I’m not trying to replace it.

An AI-supervised remote exam went so badly that 58,000 students must retake it — Ars Technica

Earlier this summer, nearly 160,000 applicants took the entrance exam for UNAM, Mexico’s largest university. For the first time, they did it completely remotely, using a “lockdown” browser and AI-powered webcam proctoring software, over several weeks from late May through early June. It was a disaster.

From Blame to Resilience: Why High-Performing Teams Run Blameless Retrospectives — Women in Testing

We have all sat through that meeting.

A critical bug hits production. The system goes down, payments fail, or a major client gets locked out. The management team calls a sudden emergency review meeting.

But within ten minutes, the meeting completely derailed. Instead of trying to fix the problem, everyone starts pointing fingers to protect themselves:

Black Hat USA 2026: The 'Breaking' News: The OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident — BlackHat

A Technical Reconstruction and Its Implications for AI When AI Goes Rogue. The Incident That Changed Everything. An OpenAI evaluation agent broke out of its sandbox, infiltrated Hugging Face infrastructure, and attempted to steal test answers—all autonomously. No human involved. The era of AI-driven cyberattacks is here. Are you prepared?

A researcher bought noreply.net. Companies started sending him secrets. — Ars Technica

Cory Solovewicz receives more unwanted emails than you. Seriously—it’s a lot more. Since December 2024, one of the domains at which the security researcher receives email has registered 401,796 messages—by his calculations that’s an average of 699.99 pings per day.

The one community word to outshine all others — Simon Tomes

Thanks, merci, danke, gracias, arigatō and shukran!

When was the last time you said thanks to someone in your tech community? It was probably very recently. You might have done it without realising. Or maybe you haven’t said thanks for a while. Either way, it pays to pay attention to when you say thanks.

AI Learning Plan for Testers (Free Resources Only) — Rahul Parwal

Testers keep asking me this wherever I go and visit. The industry is going through a tech divide, and people want to upskill and re-pivot their career and skills towards AI. This is a great thing. I am creating this guide for those who want to do it. It will be crisp, and actionable.

5 big ideas from "Test Automation Fundamentals" book — Oleksandr Romanov

My review of the "Test Automation Fundamentals" book by Manfred Baumgartner, Thomas Steirer, Marc-Florian Wendland, Stefan Gwihs, Julian Hartner, Richard Seidl

Angie Jones: AI and QEs, hiring thoughts — Angie Jones

AI has pretty much completely changed how we build software, which means we also need to change how we interview and hire software engineers.

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