Yorkshire DevOps #37 - June 2026

Yorkshire DevOps returns for its 37th meetup on Tuesday 23 June 2026, hosted at Burendo's Leeds office on Floor 3, 10 Wellington Place. Two talks are on the bill, both grounded in the practical realities of running software delivery at pace.

First up, Katja Obring, founder of Kato Coaching, makes the case that AI hasn't broken testing — it's just accelerated poor decision-making. Her talk, AI didn't break testing. It just made bad decisions faster, reframes AI adoption in testing as a quality and decision problem rather than a tooling one. She'll cover what AI is genuinely useful for in testing workflows, where it falls short, and how teams can assess risk before committing to integration. Attendees leave with a practical framework for using AI as an accelerator while keeping accountability and intent with the humans in the room.

The second talk comes from Patrick Lemons, Principal Engineer at Burendo. From Risky to Ready walks through how to build assessment and transition processes that meet services at their current level of DevOps maturity and move them forward without stalling delivery. Not every service in a fast-moving organisation is at the same point, and Lemons addresses that reality head-on.

Yorkshire DevOps has been running since well before this 37th edition, bringing together engineers, ops practitioners and delivery folk from across the region. The group meets regularly in Leeds, with sponsors including Ada Meher, Digital Endeavours, CGI and the Financial Conduct Authority. Events are free to attend and follow a consistent format: networking, two talks, a break in between. The code of conduct is published at yorkshiredevops.dev.

Why attend

Both talks address problems that come up in real delivery teams: how to integrate AI into testing without creating a false sense of coverage, and how to raise DevOps maturity across a portfolio of services without grinding everything to a halt. These are practitioner-level topics from people working in the field, not vendor pitches.

The format gives you 30–40 minutes of networking before the talks start, which is a reasonable window to meet other engineers and ops people from Leeds and the wider Yorkshire tech scene. Free to attend, city-centre location, done by 8pm.

Agenda

• 17:45 — Arrivals and networking
• 18:25 — Welcome and introductions
• 18:30 — Talk 1: AI didn't break testing. It just made bad decisions faster — Katja Obring
• 19:00 — Break
• 19:10 — Talk 2: From Risky to Ready — Patrick Lemons
• 19:45 — Close

Speakers

• Katja Obring — Founder, Kato Coaching. Talk: AI didn't break testing. It just made bad decisions faster
• Patrick Lemons — Principal Engineer at Burendo. Talk: From Risky to Ready