Attend a community meet-up in Cape Town on 18 June and in Durban on 25 June.
Inspired Testing, which positions itself as a leading specialist in software quality assurance and testing, is hosting two community meet-ups this June, in Cape Town on 18 June and in Durban on 25 June, bringing together QA engineers, test leads, developers and technology leaders for an evening of exploring ‘what’s next?’ for the industry: knowledge sharing, practical insights and networking.
The Cape Town event takes place at the Shoprite Group’s Home Office Studio in Brackenfell, while the Durban meet-up marks a significant milestone: the first-ever Software Testing Community Meet-up in KwaZulu-Natal, hosted at BET Software. Both events run from 6pm to 9pm and are free to attend.
Unpacking the real challenges of modern software quality
The Cape Town meet-up opens with a session that will resonate with any engineering team that has ever been caught off guard by a production failure.
Hennie Francis, AWS Technical Account Manager at Silicon Overdrive, presents Mayday! Monkeys on the Loose in Production! – an exploration of chaos engineering and resilience testing that challenges the assumption that perfection is the goal. The session argues that controlled failure, rather than its avoidance, is the foundation of genuinely robust systems.
Following this, Willem Mouton, QA Engineering and Testing Practice Lead at the Shoprite Group, discusses From Automation-Centric to AI-Native Testing: Lessons from the Field. Mouton takes attendees through what AI-native testing actually means in practice, covering the decisions, enablement strategies and guardrails his team developed, and what they would do differently if starting again today.
The evening closes with a panel discussion, Testing in the Age of Complex Systems, facilitated by Leon Lodewyks, Chief Technology Officer of Inspired Testing, and joined by Mouton, Jéhan Coetzee, Head of Technology and Innovation at Inspired Testing, and Francis. The panel tackles a question that keeps QA leaders awake at night: how do you build release confidence when your system is a web of APIs, cloud services, legacy dependencies and third-party platforms that none of your tests can fully simulate?
KwaZulu-Natal gets its first dedicated testing community event
The Durban meet-up, hosted by MC Karmen Pillay from BET Software, opens with a session that takes a deliberately different angle. André Barnard, drawing on his experience in Rugby Operations Effectiveness: Team Culture with The Sharks, presents Courageous Curiosity: Staying Human in an AI World, a timely reminder that adaptability, not any fixed skillset, is a professional's greatest long-term asset. The session challenges QA practitioners to respond to AI not with anxiety, but with curiosity.
Mathew Zungu, Senior Solutions Consultant at Inspired Testing, then delivers a frank, practical session on model-based test automation: Codeless but Not Brainless: What Model-Based Automation with Tosca Actually Looks Like. Zungu unpacks the real mechanics of Tricentis Tosca, including where the "codeless" promise holds and where it quietly creates new maintenance challenges, an honest evaluation suited to any tester or QA lead considering or already working with the platform.
Rounding out the evening, Kim Johnston, Head QA Programme Manager at Inspired Testing, presents The Journey of Stakeholder Management: Should We Lose or Use Governance? – exploring how QA teams can leverage governance frameworks to strengthen stakeholder relationships and work alongside audit functions rather than against them. Johnston also includes some helpful tips on how to reduce some of the friction that the mere word ‘governance’ elicits.
Why these meet-ups matter
South Africa's software testing community is navigating a period of rapid transformation. AI is reshaping automation, complex distributed architectures are outpacing traditional testing approaches, and the role of the QA professional is shifting.
These meet-ups provide a space for practitioners across experience levels to engage with these changes through real-world examples, sharing their collective and reflective wisdom through honest conversation and the perspectives of peers working through the same challenges.
"Software testing is about more than following the software development cycle; it's about continuously learning, adapting and improving," says Nadine du Toit, Managing Executive at Inspired Testing. "By sharing insights from our peers, we can collectively strengthen the QA profession."
Attendance is free, but spaces are limited. Both events are open to QA engineers, SDETs, automation and performance engineers, test leads, QA managers, heads of quality and software testers at any stage of their career.
- Cape Town | Thursday, 18 June 2026 | Shoprite Group Home Office Studio, Brackenfell | Register TODAY
- Durban | Thursday, 25 June 2026 | BET Software, Umhlanga| Register TODAY
Software testing meet-ups will also take place in Centurion on 2 September and Johannesburg on 3 September as part of the celebrations leading up to Software Tester’s Day on 9 September. You can register your interest here now.
The quality assurance profession is evolving at pace – join the conversation that is shaping its future.
