In this talk, we’ll explore quality as an emergent property of our teams, tools, and processes—not just something we test at the end. We’ll look at challenges like speed to market and enshittification(1), and how they impact our approach to quality.

We’ll introduce practical ways to think about quality through attributes like testability, observability, and recoverability. Most importantly, we’ll explore why a quality strategy—not just a testing strategy—is key to building better products.

(1) “Enshittification is a pattern in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time” by Cory Doctorow source

I’m an electronic engineer by trade, but software testing found me while I was working on Layer 4 protocols—and I’ve been hooked ever since. In the past, I taught software testing as an adjunct professor at UTS. These days, I work in engineering leadership, consult with teams on quality I bring a systems thinking lens to building quality in products, shaped by years working across startups, enterprises, and tech companies. I also wrote The Quality Coach’s Handbook, which you can find on Amazon or Leanpub.

"I would have killed that if it was just me, 100%,” said Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek about Discover Weekly, a feature that would become one of Spotify’s most loved product features, almost a brand in itself.

Designers and senior engineers were equally skeptical, but the team was still able to ship the feature.

In this talk, you’ll learn how Spotify’s organisational culture of Agile management and autonomous teams enables innovation, using the Discover Weekly feature as an example.

Joakim Sundén is a founding partner of Better Product Work,

where he helps visionary leaders challenge the conventional way of

building products. From 2011 to 2017, he worked as a Senior Agile Coach

at Spotify, where he was part of a team collaborating with the CTO to

develop the company’s approach to customer-focused product development

at scale. This model would later become world-famous as ‘the Spotify

Model’ of Tribes, Squads, Chapters, and Guilds. He now assists leaders

in transforming and improving their organizations into models where

employees are empowered to create innovative solutions that not only

customers love but also drive business success.

Did you know that crows are better than toddlers at generating novel solutions? It's true! In the earliest days of childhood, around the globe scientists have documented that human cognition struggles to generate novel solutions. But we are adept at imitation, transmitting and teaching the solutions that we see others put into practice. What does this have to do with software, and innovation, and the cultures we want to create for the communities we love? I'm a psychologist fascinated by cycles of innovation in developer communities, and I think a simple reframe lights the way forward for our industry: in this talk, rather than focusing on what drives individual developer productivity, together we’re going to focus on the science of what drives developers’ collaborative problem-solving. We'll dive into the cognitive architecture of problem-solving, as well as what I've learned from leading empirical research with thousands of developers.

Cat Hicks is a psychologist for software teams and defender of the mismeasured. She is the author of the Developer Thriving framework, the AI Skill Threat framework, and the VP of Research at Pluralsight. Cat is the founder of the Developer Success Lab, an open science research lab that creates empirical evidence about how organisations and individuals can achieve sustainable, resilient innovation in technology and create more well-being for technologists. Cat is also the founder of Catharsis Consulting, a scientific consultancy that connects organisations to human-centred evidence strategies. Cat holds a Ph.D. in Quantitative Experimental Psychology from UC San Diego, serves on the Advisory Council of the University of San Diego Center for Digital Civil Society, and is the author of a forthcoming book on the psychology of software teams.