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Thomas Howard

Thomas Howard

Seattle, WA

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

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,

Scaling Quality Engineering from Startup Scrappy to Enterprise-Grade

Scaling Quality Engineering from Startup Scrappy to Enterprise-Grade

Most startups don’t think about Quality Engineering until it’s almost too late. At Series A or B, the product is out in the wild, customers are signing contracts, and suddenly the founders realize: Our test suite won’t survive the weight of real scale. That’s the inflection

Icarus: Build Your Own AI QA Test Agent

Icarus: Build Your Own AI QA Test Agent

Most test engineers know the pain of keeping automation in sync with a fast-moving product. Locators change, flows shift, features evolve; and suddenly your test suite is brittle. That’s where Icarus comes in. Icarus is an AI-powered test agent I built that converts annotated screenshots → structured test cases using

The CTO Playbook: A 6-Month Roadmap for Implementing AI in QA

The CTO Playbook: A 6-Month Roadmap for Implementing AI in QA

Quality has always been the bottleneck of delivery. You can scale engineering, spin up cloud environments, and automate CI/CD; but QA is the last defense between your customers and production. Artificial Intelligence changes that equation. Not by replacing testers, but by expanding their reach. With the right plan, you

The Hardest Lesson I Learned as a Quality Engineering Leader

The Hardest Lesson I Learned as a Quality Engineering Leader

When I stepped into my first true leadership role in Quality Engineering, I thought my main challenge would be building automation coverage fast enough to keep pace with engineering. Like most QA leaders, I measured success by test counts, coverage percentages, and green dashboards. But I was wrong. The real

From Manual Tests to AI-Driven QA: A 6-Month Roadmap

From Manual Tests to AI-Driven QA: A 6-Month Roadmap

For QA leaders, “AI in QA” often feels like a buzzword. Vendors pitch self-healing pipelines, auto-generated tests, or AI judges for LLM outputs. But when you’re staring down your backlog of manual test cases, flaky automation, and brittle pipelines, it’s hard to know where to even start. Here’

Prompt Regression Testing 101: How to Keep Your LLM Apps from Quietly Breaking

Prompt Regression Testing 101: How to Keep Your LLM Apps from Quietly Breaking

When we talk about testing, most people think of unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests. But if you’re working with large language models (LLMs), there’s a new kind of test you can’t ignore: prompt regression testing. It sounds fancy, but at its core it’s just