Some of my best testing insights have come in the shower. This is where I share opinions, perspectives, and half-baked ideas about software QA.
I recently learned what a “cargo cult” was. Apparently, there’s a story from World War II that goes something like this. When American forces set up military bases on remote South Pacific islands, they brought everything with them — jeeps, radios, canned food, medicine, aircraft. To the indigenous islanders watching from the treeline, the goods...
When I first started automating tests, I didn’t have a strong reason for it. Every mature QA team seemed to do it, job postings asked for it, and honestly, watching a dozen browsers open in parallel and run through test cases on their own looked really cool. That was mostly it. I knew I was...
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...
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...
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...
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...
