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 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....
Most QAs think reporting a bug means opening Jira. And sure, Jira works. But that framing limits your options. A bug is just information about a risk — here’s something wrong, here’s how bad it could be, here’s what we should do about it. And information doesn’t care how it travels. As long as the...
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...
