BrowserStack

So I'm hoping we can get down to it.

And I brought in a longtime test expert, previous engineering manager at Mozilla, and now head of open source at BrowserStack, David Burns.

Thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me, Warren.

I don't think it's my code.

It must be other people's.

Okay, well then, you know, maybe it's worth diving into a little bit your experience at BrowserStack.

Yeah, so fortunately, like a lot of what BrowserStack does is built off a lot of technology in the open source space.

That standardization emerged from the interplay between open source projects, browser vendors, and standards bodies like the W3C.

David Burns is a longtime Selenium and WebDriver contributor, a veteran of Mozilla, and is currently the head of developer advocacy and open source at BrowserStack.

In this episode, David joins Josh Goldberg to discuss how open source projects, browser vendors, and standards bodies fit together, a practical philosophy of testing built around one solid test per critical path, and the risks that AI and vibe coding introduce to web development.

This episode is hosted by Josh Goldberg, front end developer at Sentry and open source maintainer.

Find Josh on Bluesky, Fosstodon, and dotcom as joshuakgoldberg.

[upbeat music]

With me today is David Burns, head of developer advocacy and open source at BrowserStack.

David, welcome to Software Engineering Daily.

I'm your host, Ryan Donovan, and today we're talking about QA and testing and why professional skepticism, which is the QA and tester's core skill, might be the most valuable skill for all engineers.

And my guest for that today is David Burns, who is the chair of the W3C Browser Testing and Tools Working Group, co-editor of the WebDriver specification, and he also heads up the developer advocacy and open source office at BrowserStack.

So welcome to the show, David.

Thanks for having me, Ryan.

And I think it set me up really nicely because I did process re-engineering, which is another form of automation.

And then I got into test automation, worked for a startup, started up their QA department, moved to Mozilla, was there for 10 years working on automation and tooling to make engineers more productive.

And then I've been at BrowserStack for the last six years, kind of working on open source stuff, kind of telling everyone how kind of I think about QA because there's never a right answer, but there's a right direction that we should be looking at and how I approach problems, trying to make sure that kind of the web and what we see of it every day is high quality and makes us better people.

We've talked to a lot of people building agents, and I think one of the most interesting ones was somebody who was a QA tester.