RISK Framework – 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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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.

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What a Nose Swab Taught Me About Software Testing

Bleeping Bugs — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 00:24:20 +0000

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 in school — plug the right words into the right context, sound like you know…

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