I have just come back from presenting at CAST 2026 in Cocoa Beach, and something that’s been bugging me for a while finally clicked. Somewhere in every testing event I have been to in the last fifteen years, someone makes the case that testers are undervalued, and the case is usually made well. I saw […]
Singing in the Dark Read More »
Earlier this week I left a comment on a LinkedIn post about testing in an AI-assisted workflow. The post itself was fine, better than most. It argued that when the same AI writes both the function and the test, the two share the same blind spots, so you should write the test first and decide
Should the tester role even exist? Read More »
I’m partnering with SmartBear on a sponsored series of content about tools for the AI era. As always, all opinions are entirely my own. SmartBear ran a survey in January 2026 of 273 software testing and quality decision-makers, mostly directors and above, and the writeup, their AI Software Quality Gap Report, lets the numbers speak
Fighting AI with AI is the easy part Read More »
Session two closed with a question I couldn’t answer.1 When a product scores 78% on a given metric, what tells you whether that’s good enough to ship? I flagged it as something session three would probably address, and it did, though not in the way I expected. The question can’t be meaningfully answered until you’ve
The anatomy of a metric Read More »
Session one left me with two things I hadn’t resolved.1 The first was a line the instructor said almost in passing: “the hard part is scalability, not automation.” I wrote it down because it piqued something, but I couldn’t quite work out what problem it was pointing at. The second was a question I kept
The AI evals field chose a flawed tool and stuck with it Read More »
If you’ve been following me on Linkedin, or indeed have been reading my blog for a while, you’ll know that I’m interested in AI applications. So it’s probably not coming as a total surprise to you that my main learning goals this year evolve around AI evals, “which are systematic tests and measurements to that
What I don’t understand about AI evals (yet) Read More »
You know the feature inside out. You have tested it, broken it, rebuilt the test suite around it twice. So you ask the AI to generate a few test cases. Save yourself twenty minutes. What comes back looks reasonable. The structure is right. The naming conventions are close enough. Then you start reading. The first
You were promised speed. You got a new job instead. Read More »
I’ve been seeing a lot of posts on LinkedIn recently that make the same claim: speed of writing code was never the bottleneck in software engineering. The real bottleneck was always thinking, choosing the right thing to build, understanding the problem. AI has just made that painfully obvious. I partly agree, but the framing is
Why the bottleneck was never just about thinking Read More »
Every time the topic of using AI for code reviews comes up, someone will eventually say that it is like letting the AI mark its own homework. It sounds clever. It also sounds responsible. Underneath it sits a familiar discomfort about oversight, trust, and professional judgement. As an analogy, it points attention away from the
Review as analysis, not authority, when working with AI Read More »
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 »
