Shower Thoughts – BleepingBugs

A Philosophy for QA: The RISK Framework

Bleeping Bugs — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 04:00:15 +0000

In grad school I was researching how students debug their code. I came across something called Information Foraging Theory — the idea that people hunting for information follow certain scent trails, signals in the environment that promise high-value information for the least amount of effort. Like an animal following a smell toward food. I wasn’t thinking about QA at the time.

Source

QA’s Unique Skill Isn’t Finding Bugs

Bleeping Bugs — Sun, 31 May 2026 18:24:41 +0000

Every discipline has a core skill. The thing that looks simple from the outside but takes years to actually develop. Developers have the ability to build systems — translating logic into working software. Product managers translate messy human needs into structured requirements. Designers make complex things feel intuitive. I’ve been thinking about what QA’s equivalent is. And I don’t think…

Source

The Cargo Cult of Eliminating QA

Bleeping Bugs — Sat, 30 May 2026 20:32:13 +0000

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 seemed to appear almost magically. Planes landed.

Source

Why We Do Test Automation

Bleeping Bugs — Mon, 25 May 2026 17:00:00 +0000

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 saving time. But I wasn’t fully confident in the results. I’d run the suite and then go double-check…

Source

The Test Plan Nobody Reads

Bleeping Bugs — Sat, 23 May 2026 21:01:24 +0000

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 them anyway, convinced that if I just got the format right, or shared it at the right time…

Source

QA Doesn’t Break Things

Bleeping Bugs — Wed, 13 May 2026 00:36:10 +0000

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 it, something bothers me that I couldn’t quite put into words for a while.

Source

My Load Testing Origin Story

Bleeping Bugs — Sat, 09 May 2026 02:21:32 +0000

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. I was working at a testing vendor, and a client needed their site load tested. My first step was to find a load…

Source

So You Want to Break Into Software QA

Bleeping Bugs — Fri, 08 May 2026 05:09:00 +0000

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 the QA side. We followed the professor’s instructions, fumbled through the test cases…

Source

Testing LLM Apps Isn’t That Different

Bleeping Bugs — Thu, 07 May 2026 04:06:50 +0000

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 were building a chatbot to calculate the cost…

Source

The Role of QA Is Surfacing Risk

Bleeping Bugs — Wed, 06 May 2026 03:34:15 +0000

A few years ago I wrote about how a long pandemic shower helped me realize that software testing is really just collecting information about system behavior. 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 thinking has landed: Not finding bugs.

Source