When I got my first QA Engineer job out of college at a small financial company, I did what any new grad would do. I googled “QA process.” Then I googled “what should a QA process look like.” Then I googled “how to build a QA process from scratch.” I read a lot of articles....
For over a year I sent a test plan at the start of every sprint. Same format, same sections, shared in the same Slack channel every time. In all that time, maybe one or two of them got a comment from anyone outside the QA team. Not from product. Not from engineering. I kept sending...
Most test plans I’ve seen start with scope before talking about risks. Here’s what we’ll test, here’s what we won’t. Which is fine, except it skips the question that actually drives all of it: what are the risks we’re trying to protect against? I write sprint-level test plans one per sprint, covering everything QA is...
Every few sprints, without fail, someone on the team makes the joke. A product manager, an engineer, someone in standup. “Watch out, QA’s gonna go break things again.” Or my personal favorite: “Can you not break it this time?” They’re laughing when they say it. I know they mean well. But every time I hear...
When I started in QA, I thought I had bug reports figured out. Steps to reproduce. Expected result. Actual result. Screenshot. Every tutorial said the same thing, so I did the same thing. Felt solid. Then I joined a company that used freelance testers. Video attachments were mandatory — not recommended, mandatory. The reasoning was...
What Is Load Testing? I’ve written before about how software testing is just collecting information about the quality of your application. Load testing is the same idea, narrowed to one specific question: how does your software behave under load? That information matters because performance problems are business problems. A slow checkout flow loses sales. A...
The first time I was asked to load test a website I had no idea where to start. No ChatGPT, no mentors. I Googled my way through it alone. The site was about as simple as it gets. One page. One PDF to open or download. That’s it. And I still couldn’t pull it off....
My entire four-year CS degree dedicated maybe two weeks to software testing. Final year. A professor assigned a group project — build a website with a partner team abroad, one person plays product manager, the rest are devs, and someone has to write a test plan. We had no idea what we were doing on...
There’s a common belief that testing LLM-based apps requires throwing out the whole testing playbook. Because outputs are non-deterministic, the thinking goes, traditional testing just doesn’t apply. I get it. But what I’ve seen happen in practice is teams falling back on manual spot-checking and calling it done. At one company I worked at we...
A few years ago I wrote about how a long pandemic shower helped me realize that software testing is really just collecting information. That clicked for me. But the more I’ve worked in QA since then, the more I’ve realized that definition only answers what testers do — not why it matters. Here’s where my...
