Quality doesn’t collapse overnight. It drifts. It drifts in the seams between teams, in the silence between a feature being built and a feature being tested, in the gap between what we meant to cover and what we actually did. That drift is often invisible. Until it isn’t. That’s why testing can’t live in a corner of the organization. It has to be democratized, distributed, and deliberately practiced. And if we’re serious about doing that, we need ways to see the drift before it becomes damage. Let’s dig in!
Author: Jeff Nyman
Anything I put here is an approximation of the truth. You're getting a particular view of myself ... and it's the view I'm choosing to present to you. If you've never met me before in person, please realize I'm not the same in person as I am in writing. That's because I can only put part of myself down into words.
If you have met me before in person then I'd ask you to consider that the view you've formed that way and the view you come to by reading what I say here may, in fact, both be true. I'd advise that you not automatically discard either viewpoint when they conflict or accept either as truth when they agree.
Using Narratives to Sharpen Testing Skills
As testers, we spend much of our time reviewing requirements, specifications, and user stories. We’re looking for ambiguities, inconsistencies, and contradictions. However, these analytical muscles can be exercised anywhere, including in narrative fiction. Let’s dig in!
Testing Has Something To Do With Mass Extinction
Okay, I’ll admit my title is a bit of click-bait. The better title would be “Testing Has Something To Do With Paleontology” but even that would not be correct since what I really would have to say is “Testing Has Something To Do With Paleontological Debates About Mass Extinctions in the Fossil Record.” Ugh. Even worse. You know what, let’s just dig in. (Pun slightly intended.)
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The Vibe Around Vibium
There’s a lot of buzz around Jason Huggins’ “Vibium” tool. It’s generating a lot of chatter, but there’s a fair bit of skepticism about whether it’s a tangible product or something more speculative, maybe even a tongue-in-cheek nod to the testing community. Let’s unpack this.
Quality Assurance for Society
As someone who spends their days thinking about quality assurance and testing, I’m trained to look beyond whether something works to ask whether it works well, and for whom. Quality isn’t just about technical functionality; it’s about how humans interact with technology, what happens when systems fail, and whether the design serves user needs or merely designer intentions. These questions become critical when we’re not just testing software, but evaluating proposals to restructure society itself around technological systems.
The Quality Constant: Think and Act Experimentally
I was asked what one piece advice I have that I would give to testers starting out in the industry. It had to just be one piece of advice. It’s an interesting challenge.
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Nothing to Do with Testing?
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.
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.
Testers, 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.
Testers, 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.
Test 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.
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.
Navigating 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?
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Scrutinize, 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.
Reframing 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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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!
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