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Thomas Howard

Thomas Howard

Seattle, WA

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

Test Automation Didn’t Fail—You Treated It Like a Checklist

Test Automation Didn’t Fail—You Treated It Like a Checklist

Every time I hear someone say, “Automation didn’t work for us,” I have to ask: Did automation fail you—or did you fail automation? The truth is, most teams don’t build automation. They build checklists in code and pray it holds up. The Real Villain: Misguided Automation Goals

If QA Shows Up After Devs Are Done, It's Already Too Late

If QA Shows Up After Devs Are Done, It's Already Too Late

Let’s be blunt: If your QA team is reviewing tickets after development wraps, you're not testing software— you're testing luck. And most teams are running out of it. Despite all the talk of “Shift Left,” many organizations still treat QA as the final checkbox before

How to Train GPT-4-mini to Write Manual Test Cases from Screenshots

How to Train GPT-4-mini to Write Manual Test Cases from Screenshots

Manual test case creation is one of the most time-consuming and repetitive parts of the QA lifecycle. It’s also where quality often gets cut when timelines compress. But here’s what we discovered at Snap: By training GPT-4-mini to generate test cases from annotated screenshots, we slashed our manual

You Can’t Test In Quality: Why QE Is About Prevention, Not Detection

You Can’t Test In Quality: Why QE Is About Prevention, Not Detection

“Quality can’t be tested in—it has to be engineered in.” I’ve said this line more times than I can count. Not because it’s catchy—but because it’s the core truth that too many engineering leaders still ignore. When most teams talk about “quality,” what they’

QA Teams of 2030—Embedded, AI-Powered, and Unstoppable

QA Teams of 2030—Embedded, AI-Powered, and Unstoppable

QA Teams of 2030: Forward-Deployed Engineers and the New Quality Paradigm How embedding QA, AI orchestration, and strategic oversight will redefine software quality over the next five years In my recent article, “The Myth of QA’s Demise,” I debunked the idea that quality assurance would be entirely automated out

The Myth of QA’s Demise

The Myth of QA’s Demise

“Is QA dead?” It’s a provocative question that seems to surface every few years, usually whenever a new testing tool emerges or a buzzworthy technology takes center stage. Today, in July 2025, the rise of AI in software development has revived that question with fresh intensity. But the truth

The Real Reason Your Test Automation Is Failing: Bad Leadership

The Real Reason Your Test Automation Is Failing: Bad Leadership

Test automation isn’t failing because of bad engineers—it’s failing because no one is investing in them. That’s not a hot take. That’s a painful, persistent truth I see in startup after startup, enterprise after enterprise. And it’s time we talked about it. The Villain