Bartek: Hi, this is Bartek Śliwa. Welcome to another episode of Euvic Talks, where we combine business with technology. Today, we’re adding quality and quality-driven decision-making to the mix. Our guest is Habib Moskin. Hi, Habib.

Habib: Hi, it’s a pleasure to be here. Hi, Bartek.

Bartek: Habib, a standard question to start the show: could you briefly introduce your business journey? How did you get to where you are today?

Habib: Man, all these stories feel a bit stretched, don’t they? Ultimately, we never really know what led us here. I feel like it’s all a coincidence of luck and circumstances. But my story is simple. I’m half-Syrian, half-Polish, and in the 90s, I dreamed of being an astronaut. I quickly realized that wouldn’t happen given my ethnic background and the reality of the 90s. I was obsessed with space. I remember the Mars Climate Orbiter mission—it entered the atmosphere too early and burned up. It intrigued me: how could the best NASA specialists, whom I saw as demigods, make such a simple mistake that halted the dreams of every young boy in the 90s?

I didn’t think about space or technology for a long time after that. I chose law school, and by total chance, I got a job in quality. I liked computers, but I didn’t want to study IT back then because in the early 2000s, “IT” meant plugging in printers. I figured law was general enough that I’d figure something out later. And then I hit the world of quality. I realized very quickly that I didn’t know how to do it, how to test. Then I realized there was no one to explain it to me. We are such a young industry that we don’t even have a clear idea of what “quality” actually is.

I started wondering where it comes from. I went through large logistics implementations for giants like Merck, Microsoft, and Unilever. That’s when I got interested in the process-oriented side of quality—the part people only care about when it’s too late. Eventually, I started my own companies, and now I run TestSpring, a consulting and outsourcing firm. And I have to brag: I finally made it to Spacetech. I recently returned from the ESA Product Assurance conference, where I presented a new approach to quality—how to keep rockets from exploding. I think I got there through good people, risky decisions, and passion.

Bartek: And empathy. When I met you, I felt you draw people in through your empathetic approach. That’s a unique value these days.

Habib: That’s a very interesting observation; thank you. I think that’s the foundation of quality—it’s about understanding what you want to achieve. You have to step into the shoes of the designer, the business, or the dev to understand their struggles and provide data for good decisions.

Bartek: Regarding quality: what’s your perspective on the lack of quality criteria among product managers or executives? It seems easier to hire developers, but people look at QA engineers differently.

Habib: I could talk about this for hours because it has clear business implications—it’s about money and efficiency. In our world, quality is often just “testing.” “I have a QA, he clicks around, cool kid, but we’re doing business here, don’t bother us.” But quality does NOT equal testing. Quality is a tool to determine if your project is profitable. We can learn this from traditional manufacturing.

I want to teach that quality is data and metrics for making decisions based on facts, not intuition. What tells you a project is finished? An invoice? A handshake? Or bankruptcy? The only objective proof that something was done is a quality control report. Look at the automotive industry—is a car ready when it leaves the line, or when it meets safety specs? Quality tells you how much of your production time is wasted—time that should have been profit but became a loss. High margins in tech mask this loss. In a jam factory, if every fifth jar is unsellable, you go out of business. In tech, we do this every day.

Bartek: I like the link between quality and entrepreneurship. How does quality actually speed up production?

Habib: NASA stats show that design is 15% of the budget but generates 75% of the total lifecycle costs. Ensuring you’re doing the right thing early on saves a fortune. We have the “Rule of Ten”—each subsequent phase of a project costs 10 times more to fix than the previous one.

Pragmatically: people say tests “hold us up.” But what if we could ensure that what we build is 95% defect-free from the start? We have math and risk modeling for this. Quality only becomes “interesting” to most people after something blows up. Take Boeing in 2019—a leveling system implemented through the “back door” to save on pilot training led to a 25% drop in company value due to crashes. If they had spent an extra year on quality, they would have had ten years of business peace.

Bartek: That requires a cultural shift. You said tests “hold us up.” That’s a sad stereotype. How do we change that mindset?

Habib: I’d add to that: tests hold up… a speeding bus heading for a concrete wall. That’s a good thing. It’s hard to understand when you want to deliver “here and now.” But there’s no better way than translating risk into cash. If you know that a lack of testing could cost $100k and testing costs $20k—it’s simple math. I encourage the rule: don’t test everything, always. Often, it’s NOT worth testing. ROI exists in QA too. If we tested where it matters, there’d be no feeling that QA slows us down.

Bartek: And where does it matter?

Habib: It depends (laughs). It matters on critical business paths. In an e-commerce store, what’s the biggest tech risk? That you can’t buy or sell. That needs deep testing: the cart, payments. But the privacy policy? It just needs to be there. Don’t spend two days looking for typos in it. Set a budget and define what must be secured. That’s the only approach that makes business sense.

Bartek: How do you outsource this approach? It’s not common to sell “quality business logic” instead of just “manual testers.”

Habib: This is a turning point. Companies come back to us saying their previous offshore or in-house QA didn’t work. TestSpring is an expert firm. We do less pure outsourcing and more “consulting-outsourcing.” We analyze how you work to understand what quality means for you. We provide the people, but we also implement procedures and metrics. Quality issues often come from a lack of knowledge, not bad will. We show the way, hold the client’s hand, until they are ready to do it themselves.

Bartek: So it’s about testing the right things to drive the business.

Habib: I’ll share a secret from our process for free: “What does quality mean in your company?” It’s a very hard question. It must be measurable: the ratio of dev time to bug fixing, Google Shop reviews, or response time to customer-reported bugs. When you show devs graphical data, the magic happens. They see how their work affects the whole organization. They understand why “shifting left” matters. Quality is simply measuring the efficiency of your organization.

Bartek: So, first, a shared understanding of quality, then a contract on what to do next.

Habib: Exactly. We set goals based on risks. What has the highest probability of failure and the biggest impact? If your risk is high turnover, the quality problem is actually a long onboarding process and low ROI on new hires. We can help improve onboarding. That affects bugs because new people leave information gaps. We set a time frame—say 3 months—to see results. Don’t fall for “we need more quality.” Ask: “What does that mean specifically?”

Bartek: I like the focus on metrics. I recently saw a case where onboarding took 6 months. That usually happens when business doesn’t talk to IT.

Habib: There are no recipes. Anyone selling a “one-size-fits-all” recipe is lying. There are principles, not just “best practices” that worked for someone else once. If I use a principle instead of a rigid standard, I find the real cause of the problem. We love “best practices” because they’re easy to sell—like morning routines. But every organization is different and needs a fresh analysis.

Bartek: A provocative question: with AI, will testers be replaced by developers using AI tools?

Habib: If we replace the tester, I’d hope we replace the developer first. Testing is broader and more abstract. Development is deterministic—it either works or it doesn’t. AI is a natural process of automation, like robotics in Detroit. A factory worker used to have a house and two cars; now everyone can have a car, but factory work is different. The cost of digital services should drop; we need to stop being “craft shops” and become “factories.”

Quality will be needed in more important places. Don’t waste a tester’s time checking if a link works—use computer vision for that. Teach people metrics and how to find value before development starts. The second thing is security—a human must oversee that AI is working correctly. In Spacetech, there are no flight standards for AI-written code yet. The conclusion at the conference was clear: use AI as much as you want, but a human must sign off on the results.

Bartek: Quality culture requires “smart” people. What about those who just like the simple work, like comparing two images?

Habib: What would you do if you had a machine that was 10 times faster? (laughs). You’d choose the faster one. I value the European focus on human interaction, though. In the US, culture supports business; in Europe, the human is a more important unit. I respect the individual’s impact on a team. Sometimes firing an “inefficient” person breaks the team’s spirit. The value is the team, not just a spreadsheet.

Bartek: That’s a powerful message. A spreadsheet isn’t enough; you need the human factor, which is hard with remote work. AI and remote work have introduced a sort of “psychosis”—we’re all a bit rattled. Can we measure humanity?

Habib: I don’t know, but in Scrum, we have Team Velocity. It measures the team as a whole. A factory won’t speed up if you replace one part with a faster one if the bottleneck is elsewhere—that’s the Theory of Constraints. Sometimes a “better” developer ruins a team. We use old metrics for new problems and make decisions in chaos as if it were a simple, deterministic environment. That scares me.

Bartek: The question of measuring humanity will stay with me. To wrap up: what inspired you recently?

Habib: Space. The ESA Product Assurance conference. I saw 200 people who cared about quality BEFORE something went wrong. People with immense respect for their work because there, it’s “safety first.” It’s inspiring how dreams of space exploration trickle down—everyone understands their role in the project’s success. We’re just ants, but everyone feels that their work helps the Gateway station orbit the Moon.

Bartek: That’s inspiring, as teams often don’t know “the why” behind their work.

Habib: It’s almost metaphysical. Everyone is as unique as 8 billion other people. There’s the butterfly effect—what we do daily matters. A smile on the street could lead someone to start a company that cures cancer. I’m learning to appreciate that. I’m moving from the pragmatism of data toward an idea: every day, be at least a little bit better, and find a way to measure it.

Bartek: Great. Thank you so much.

Habib: Thank you.

Bartek: And thank you all for listening and watching. This was Euvic Talks. See you in the next episode. Bye!