It is time for the sixth annual Testing Peers festive special.
In this end-of-year episode, our hosts Beth Marshall, Chris Armstrong, Russell Craxford, David Maynard, Tara Walton and Rachel Kibler look back over a chaotic, curious, and occasionally hilarious year in tech and testing through the lens of the 12 Bugs of Christmas. From global outages and AI hallucinations to game launch disasters and rogue smart devices, nothing is safe from festive scrutiny.
There is festive banter, honest reflection, and yes… singing at the end (not Chris, but actually talented Rachel).
What we cover
- Festive ice breakers and favourite seasonal sweet treats
- Major cloud outages and what they revealed about resilience, cost, and dependency
- Social media platform downtime and when it actually matters
- Viral AI hallucinations, including the infamous seahorse emoji
- Image generation fails and uncanny AI content
- Game launch delays, skipped releases, and day-one disasters
- OS updates that bricked devices and took critical services offline
- Public communication failures, viral PR clangers, and influencer fallout
- Smart device glitches, from overheated beds to failing car systems
- Annual e-commerce crashes and ticket sale meltdowns
- Financial services failures, banking downtime, and security realities
- Personal “bugs” from the hosts and the lessons behind them
- The biggest lesson the testing industry learned this year
The festive finale 🎶
As a reward for anyone who made it to the end of the episode, Rachel Kibler treats us to a Testing Peers rendition of The 12 Days of Christmas:
“On the 12th day of Christmas, my testers gave to me:
12 words of wisdom
11 life fails
10 financial outages
9 Ticketmaster hell holes
8 smart device glitches
7 PR disasters
6 bricked computers
5 game launches
4 generative AI image gaps
3 seahorse emoji prompts
2 social media blackouts
1 cloud server outage”
Themes that kept coming up
- AI as augmentation, not replacement
- The cost of speed over understanding
- Old systems hidden behind shiny interfaces
- Humans still being the biggest risk in any system
- The importance of fundamentals, context, and knowing what you are shipping
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Thanks to our sponsors – NFocus Testing.
nFocus are a UK based software testing company. They’ve been supporting businesses for 24 years by providing services that include burst resource, accelerated test automation, performance testing and fully managed testing services. In 2021, they launched a Test Automation Academy to create amazing testers and they’ve now created jobs for 48 people in our industry in just under three years!
nFocus were a big part of PeersCon in 2024 and 2025, really grateful for all they do to support the Testing Peers.
www.nfocus.co.uk and info@nfocus.co.uk for anyone wanting to get in touch.