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Thomas Howard

Thomas Howard

Seattle, WA

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

Why Fast QA Teams Need Good CI

Why Fast QA Teams Need Good CI

In quality engineering, speed is everything. But speed without control is chaos. That’s why modern QE teams live and die by the quality of their Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines. Good CI is not just a DevOps concern; it’s a force multiplier for quality teams. Done right, it gives

From Power Plants to Chatbots: How AI Really Works

From Power Plants to Chatbots: How AI Really Works

When you ask an AI a question; whether it’s ChatGPT, Claude, or something running on your phone; it feels like magic. But under the hood, there’s nothing magical about it. It’s an enormous industrial stack, stretching from giant warehouses full of computers all the way down to

The New QA Team: Evolving Roles in an AI-Powered Future

The New QA Team: Evolving Roles in an AI-Powered Future

The QA team you knew is no more. The new quality organization isn’t a team; it’s an intelligence function, woven throughout the software lifecycle. And in this next era, our roles are shifting as dramatically as the tools we use. Gone are the days when success meant writing

Why AI Won’t Replace QA Teams - and Why You Still Need Humans

Why AI Won’t Replace QA Teams - and Why You Still Need Humans

Every week I see a version of the same hot take on LinkedIn: “We don’t need QA anymore. We’ll just use AI.” - some CTO It’s a tempting idea. AI is everywhere, reshaping software development and automating tasks we once thought untouchable. If AI can generate code,

Scaling Quality: Why Good Engineering Practices Are Non-Negotiable

Scaling Quality: Why Good Engineering Practices Are Non-Negotiable

In software development, quality is often seen as the responsibility of the QA or QE team. But the truth is blunt: you cannot scale quality without good engineering practices. At best, you can prop it up temporarily with brute force; running long manual regressions, firefighting in production, endless bug triage;

Building an AI Oracle to Cover Enterprise AI Agents

Building an AI Oracle to Cover Enterprise AI Agents

If you’ve ever tried to scale test coverage for an AI agent, you’ve probably hit the same wall most teams do: running the tests is easy; evaluating them is the hard part. Modern infrastructure can spin up tens of thousands of scenarios overnight. But knowing whether those 50,

Scaling Playwright Automation from Zero to Enterprise

Scaling Playwright Automation from Zero to Enterprise

Most startups and even mid-stage companies hit a wall: they want to move fast, but every release risks regressions, late-night bug bashes, and unhappy customers. The way out is scalable automation; but it’s not just about writing Playwright tests. Scaling Playwright to enterprise-grade means building a system: people, process,