You will hear a certain segment of people say things like “TDD has nothing to do with testing” or “automation has nothing to do with testing.” This is often an ill-framed argument. Let’s talk about why this matters.
Continue reading Nothing to Do with Testing?Testers, Code and Automation, Part 3
Working in our hypothetical developer-tester context over the last two posts, we’ve done some good work. We have a working implementation and we have some tests. Here we’ll finish up the work and close with some thoughts on the journey.
Continue reading Testers, Code and Automation, Part 3Testers, Code and Automation, Part 2
This post will continue from the first post. Here I’ll continue the exploration of testers interacting and intersecting with code, while making sure to consider good test and code practices.
Continue reading Testers, Code and Automation, Part 2Testers, Code and Automation, Part 1
There is much talk out there about whether testers should learn code. There is even more talk out there about automation. What there isn’t, at least so far as I can see, is much that shows actual examples that break down some concepts, particularly for testers entering the field. Here’s one of my attempts.
Continue reading Testers, Code and Automation, Part 1Test Defender!
With the advent of 2025, I realized it was the forty year anniversary of one my earliest exposures to testing. This exposure involved helping an arcade operator test cabinet-based coin-op arcade games. I decided to try and recreate this context and allow others to do the same thing.
Continue reading Test Defender!Testing at Play: Navigating Qualities
In this post, I’m going to talk about how I approach testing from the standpoint of internal and external qualities. I’m also going to indicate why I think automation is a form of testing but certainly cannot be all of testing. However, bear with me, as I’m going to approach this via a specific scenario around games.
Continue reading Testing at Play: Navigating QualitiesNavigating the AI Shift: A Tester’s Mandate
It’s very clear that artificial intelligence has become more democratized than at any other time in history. It’s also fairly clear that this democratization will not only continue but likely accelerate. What is the mandate for quality and test specialists in this context?
Continue reading Navigating the AI Shift: A Tester’s MandateScrutinize, Stabilize, Sustain
A lot of talk in the testing industry still focus on that divide between “automation” and “manual testing.” A lot of talk also focuses around how much and to what extent developers do testing. Here I want to provide a short post that indicates what I’ve done in my career, either as an individual contributor, a manager of teams, or a director.
Continue reading Scrutinize, Stabilize, SustainReframing Testing Arguments
I was giving a presentation to developers as well as engineering hiring managers who make decisions around hiring test practitioners. This came about regarding recent decisions in hiring, or rather, lack thereof. Brought up to me numerous times was the idea that testers are not being hired if they even hinted at the idea of testing as distinct from checking. So let’s talk about this. Continue reading Reframing Testing Arguments
The Social Dimension of Testing
I’ve talked in the past about my perception that specialist testers need to be cross-discipline associative. And while I’ve implicitly given some ideas about what that means in various posts, here I want to be a bit more explicit. Continue reading The Social Dimension of Testing
AI-Powered Testing: Exploring and Exploiting with Reinforcement
There’s a lot of talk out there about using large language models to help testers write tests, such as coming up with scenarios. There’s also talk out there about AI based tools actually doing the testing. Writing tests and executing tests are both a form of performing testing. So let’s talk about what this means in a human and an AI context. Continue reading AI-Powered Testing: Exploring and Exploiting with Reinforcement
What Actually Is Testing?
One thing that’s often interesting is to define foundational terms within your discipline. It’s often even more interesting when you come across a discipline that seems to struggle with doing so. Is that the case for testing? Well, let’s talk about it. Continue reading What Actually Is Testing?
My Role as Quality and Test Specialist
I often frame whatever role I’m in as a Quality and Test Specialist. It’s not really a term or phrase that our industry agrees upon. Normally people want the word “Engineer” somewhere in their title as if that term somehow wasn’t terribly vague. So let’s dig in to what I mean when I talk about being a specialist. Continue reading My Role as Quality and Test Specialist
Text Trek: Navigating Classifications, Part 6
In this final post of this series, we’ll look at training our learning model on our Emotions dataset. This post is the culmination of everything we’ve learned in the first three posts in this series and then implemented in the previous two posts in this series. So let’s dig in for the final stretch! Continue reading Text Trek: Navigating Classifications, Part 6
Text Trek: Navigating Classifications, Part 5
This post, and the following, will bring together everything we’ve learned in the previous four posts in this text classification series. Here we’re going to use the Emotions dataset we looked at in the last post and feed it to a model. Continue reading Text Trek: Navigating Classifications, Part 5
Text Trek: Navigating Classifications, Part 4
In this post, we’re going to look at the Emotions dataset that we briefly investigated in the previous post. Here we’re going to consider the basis of that dataset. Then we’ll load it up and see if what we have to do in order to feed the data to a training model. Continue reading Text Trek: Navigating Classifications, Part 4
Text Trek: Navigating Classifications, Part 3
In this post, we’ll explore some particular datasets. The focus here is just to get a feel for what can be presented to you and what’s available for you to use. We’ll do a little bit of code in this post to get you used to how to load a dataset. Continue reading Text Trek: Navigating Classifications, Part 3
Text Trek: Navigating Classifications, Part 2
Here we’ll continue on directly from the first post where we were learning the fundamentals of dealing with text that we plan to send to a learning model. Our focus was on the tokenization and encoding of the text. These are fundamentals that I’ll reinforce further in this post. Continue reading Text Trek: Navigating Classifications, Part 2
Text Trek: Navigating Classifications, Part 1
Let’s start this “Thinking About AI” series by thinking about the idea of classifying text. Classifying, broadly speaking, relates to testing quite well. This is because, at its core, the idea of classification focuses on categorization of data and decision making based on data. More broadly, as humans, we tend to classify everything by some categories. Continue reading Text Trek: Navigating Classifications, Part 1
The Very Idea of Test Cases
Most testers are aware of the idea of a “test case.” What people outside of testing often don’t know is how much debate can swirl around what a test case is or should be. I think it’s great to have discussions about this kind of thing but I also find that there can be a temptation to either simplify it too much or complicate it too much. Continue reading The Very Idea of Test Cases