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Thomas Howard

Thomas Howard

Seattle, WA

Director of Quality Engineering | Disruptor & thought leader in building, testing & scaling enterprise automation systems

Evolving the QE Maturity Model: Quality Beyond Testing

Evolving the QE Maturity Model: Quality Beyond Testing

This is the post that launched Break the Build. It’s for every engineer, tester, or leader who's felt the pain of broken QA processes — and wants something better. I’ve spent 15+ years in the trenches of testing and automation, and this is the truth I wish

GenAI Is Useless If You Don’t Have a Test Strategy First

GenAI Is Useless If You Don’t Have a Test Strategy First

I’ve seen this mistake play out time and time again. A team is underwater—drowning in flaky tests, patchy coverage, or endless test cycles. The pressure’s on to modernize, automate, and move faster. So they reach for the latest shiny object: 💡 “Let’s use GenAI to write our

Top 5 CI Anti-Patterns That Are Slowing You Down

Top 5 CI Anti-Patterns That Are Slowing You Down

Your CI pipeline is supposed to help you move faster and ship with confidence. But for many teams, CI has become a bottleneck instead of a launchpad—bloated with scripts, flaky tests, or noisy alerts. Instead of speeding you up, it saps engineering time and trust. Let’s break the

Let’s Be Honest: Traditional QA Is Broken

Let’s Be Honest: Traditional QA Is Broken

We don’t talk about this enough. Most QA teams aren’t set up to succeed. They're treated like safety nets; brought in at the tail end of a sprint, expected to find the bugs, rubber-stamp the release, and somehow “own quality.” But here’s the truth: QA