Rob Zuber on quality, metrics, and what it means to move in the right direction at CircleCI
00:00 The challenge of shipping fast without losing sight of quality.
06:20 How AI adoption slows teams down before it makes them faster.
09:15 The lost art of QA and the mindset behind great testing.
12:08 Using LLMs to ask the questions a good QA engineer would ask.
21:09 Why velocity without direction is the wrong metric.
31:25 How to measure teams that are exploring, not just executing.
In this episode of Braintrust, Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Rob Zuber, CTO at CircleCI. Rob shares how the industry's move away from dedicated QA has cost teams more than they realize, and explains how AI is changing what good software quality actually looks like.
Rob and Ganesh discuss why velocity without direction is the wrong thing to optimize for, how LLMs can help teams think like a great QA engineer again, and what it takes to run exploration and core systems teams at fundamentally different speeds. They also get into why traditional delivery metrics fall short for innovation work, and what to measure instead when teams are discovering rather than just executing.
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