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.

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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…

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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.

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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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