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Thomas Howard

Thomas Howard

Seattle, WA

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

Building Psychological Safety in a QA Organization

Building Psychological Safety in a QA Organization

A funny thing happens when quality teams start to scale. At five people, everyone talks. At fifteen, people hesitate. At fifty, silence becomes policy. You can have all the automation coverage in the world, but if your testers and developers don’t feel safe raising risks, you’ve already lost

The 15-Minute Rule: PR Feedback SLOs

The 15-Minute Rule: PR Feedback SLOs

Engineering teams love to talk about speed. “We deploy 20 times a day.” “We can spin up a new service in an hour.” “We cut release time from weeks to hours.” But hidden beneath all those flashy stats is a quieter, less glamorous number that might matter even more: how

How to Triage CI Results (and Tag Them with AI) Using the P0–P3 Method

How to Triage CI Results (and Tag Them with AI) Using the P0–P3 Method

Continuous Integration (CI) is supposed to accelerate delivery. Push code, run tests, get fast feedback, ship with confidence. But reality? Most teams hit a wall: too many test failures, too little time, no clarity on what matters. * Is this failure a product regression or a flaky test? * Should this block

AI Isn’t Killing QA - It’s Setting It Free

AI Isn’t Killing QA - It’s Setting It Free

For as long as I’ve been in Quality Engineering, one thing has been true: We spend too much time maintaining tests, and not enough time engineering for quality. We have all felt it. Flaky tests that fail for no reason. Regression suites that take hours (or days) to run.

Stop Hunting for Jobs: Start Getting Hunted

Stop Hunting for Jobs: Start Getting Hunted

Every day, I see talented people wasting hours sending resumes into a digital black hole. They’re “hunting” for jobs, but the hunt is broken. You’re casting your line into an empty pond and hoping for a bite. And when nothing comes back, the conclusion is always the same:

The Bug Rating Matrix: A Simple System for P0–P3 Prioritization

The Bug Rating Matrix: A Simple System for P0–P3 Prioritization

If you’ve ever sat in a bug triage meeting debating whether something is critical or just annoying, you already know the problem: without a shared rubric, priority labels become subjective. One engineer says “blocker,” a tester says “cosmetic,” and suddenly release confidence drops into a black hole. That’s

QA Isn’t Dead - But It Could Be If We Quit the Fight

QA Isn’t Dead - But It Could Be If We Quit the Fight

The truth is obvious to anyone in QA right now: this is the toughest job market we’ve seen in decades. Roles are scarce. Requisitions vanish mid-process. Recruiters ghost. Entire teams are laid off under the banner of “AI efficiency.” And when jobs do appear, they attract hundreds - sometimes