In Episode 29, Ian and Ash venture into the wild frontiers of video podcasting, with Ian's "door and chair" background sure to be nominated for design awards. The pair tackle the thorny art of story splitting, with Ash confessing his frustration at watching teams scramble around massive requirements like ants on a dropped ice cream cone. Meanwhile, Ian suggests testers might be uniquely positioned to lead such efforts, having "a clear foot in each domain" – or as Ash quips, possibly Schrödinger-like properties.

The mood darkens as Ian reveals Apple's "deeply disappointed" (not "gravely disappointed" – an important semantic distinction) announcement about disabling UK encryption features following secretive government demands. Our hosts explore the concerning implications, suggesting this puts the UK's surveillance powers closer to China than democratic peers, while wondering if police might soon arrive because "computer said nick."

Between discussions of HP's spectacular customer service own-goal (forcing callers to wait 15 minutes even when operators were available), Ian's surprisingly positive experiences with Claude Code AI, and the shocking revelation that they're podcast royalty in Côte d'Ivoire (top 10!) and Cameroon (top 100!), our hosts deliver an episode that proves that story splitting may be challenging, but splitting hairs about levels of disappointment is an art form unto itself.

Links

• The Register: HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls, and then ditches it.
• Live Multicam in Final Cut Pro for iPad
• What A Lot Of Things on Bluesky, and our podcast hosting service Transistor.
• The Humanizing Work Guide to Splitting User Stories
• Mike Cohn: Five Story-Splitting Mistakes and How to Stop Making Them
• Conway's Law (wikipedia) which explains why heavily delineated technical teams (front-end, back-end, database) end up splitting work along those same boundaries rather than by user-pathway centred flows.
• Youtube: Introducing Claude Code, and Claude Code: Overview
• Apple can no longer offer Advanced Data Protection in the United Kingdom to new users
• Matthew Green: Three questions about Apple, encryption, and the U.K.
• UKGov: Investigatory Powers Act 2016, and its Wikipedia entry.
• Edward Snowden (wikipedia) and Uber's God View (The Guardian)
• ...and, of course, Cynefin.