BleepingBugs

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…

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How to Build the “Imperfect” QA Process

Bleeping Bugs — Sun, 24 May 2026 17:51:35 +0000

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. I got a lot of frameworks with a lot of boxes and arrows. None of it told me what to actually do on Monday morning.

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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…

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How To Write a Sprint Test Plan

Bleeping Bugs — Sun, 17 May 2026 19:51:51 +0000

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 responsible for in that three week window. I’ll cover project and feature…

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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.

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How to Write a Good Functional Bug Report

Bleeping Bugs — Tue, 12 May 2026 04:43:48 +0000

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 blunt: you can’t fake a video. A screenshot proves nothing…

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How to Load Test Your Backend with JMeter

Bleeping Bugs — Sun, 10 May 2026 16:46:23 +0000

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 site that goes down during a product launch damages your…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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