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 is fundamentally different from testing traditional software — that because outputs are non-deterministic, the whole testing playbook needs to be thrown out. This is not entirely true, and believing it should not be an excuse to skip testing altogether. Yes, an LLM won’t return the exact same...
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...
Most people treat a bug report like a to-do item for a developer. Fix this, it’s broken. But that’s not really what you’re doing when you report a bug. You’re communicating information. You’re communicating a risk — here’s something wrong with the application, here’s how bad it could be, here’s what we should do about...
I was three years into a QA career when the pandemic hit. Testing Manager at a tech startup, CS degree, the whole thing. You’d think I would’ve had a solid handle on what software testing actually was. I didn’t. Not really. I knew the definitions. I’d memorized them the same way I memorized Newton’s equations...
