Sometimes I despair about the QA profession. Not because the work is hard, or because quality is complex. Both of those are true, but they always have been. What gets to me is where so much of our collective energy still goes. We have much bigger fish to fry. We have the tools to do […]
AI did not break testing Read More »
That day I rage quit my project It finally fell apart over a UI reskin. I had an application that mostly worked. It was not polished, but it was coherent, testable, and good enough to keep moving. When I asked the AI to reskin it using my brand colours, what I expected to be a
Stop vibe coding before you delete your repo Read More »
When I look at the current excitement around AI in testing, I cannot help feeling a sense of déjà vu. I felt the same thing when the first wave of no code and low code testing tools arrived. At the time, vendors promised that these tools would democratise testing, eliminate the need for technical skills,
A More Balanced AI Story Read More »
If you work in testing or quality engineering, you know the feeling.You see risks early. You spot patterns before anyone else. You raise concerns because you care about what happens next.And yet the conversation stalls. People nod politely, then move on. It is frustrating. Not because you want attention, but because you want to make
Become the tester people listen to: introducing Stakeholder Ready Read More »
AI has been the background noise of every software conversation lately. Some people treat it as a superpower that will solve everything. Others point to low-quality AI slop online and see it as the end of original thought. I am somewhere in the middle. I use AI a lot, and I trust it for some
AI, curiosity, and a little procrastination Read More »
Every tester has had that moment. You look for guidance on a current problem and end up with advice that feels twenty years old. You find articles on writing test cases in Excel, or long arguments about whether automated testing can ever replace manual testing. It is a little surreal. It is easy to assume
The reason so much testing content feels stuck in the past Read More »
The experimenter’s mindset beats the automation mindset A few months ago, someone at a conference asked me whether I thought testers would still have jobs in five years. It wasn’t a joke. You could hear the anxiety in the room, because the arrival of generative AI has reignited a very old fear in our industry:
Why the Experimenter’s Mindset Outlasts Automation in Software Testing Read More »
If you’ve ever tried communicating quality to stakeholders in a planning or review meeting, only to be brushed aside with “let’s move on” or “we’ll deal with it later”, you’ll know how frustrating it feels. It’s not that you wanted to be right for the sake of it. You could see the rework coming. You
I’m heading to Malmö, Sweden soon to give a keynote. Travel planning might sound like the opposite of testing in DevOps, but I’ve found it’s a great place to practise the same habits I use with teams. My framework, Q.E.D., Question, Evidence, Develop, is designed for making better decisions about quality. But it works just
How I plan conference travel like a software experiment Read More »
Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash Burnt Out, Boxed In, and Quietly Looking for a Way Out A few years ago, I was working in a software consultancy, stuck on a team with a client who, despite spending a huge amount of money on “change”, was completely unwilling to actually change. I’d seen versions of
Burnt Out, Boxed In, and Quietly Looking for a Way Out Read More »
