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Thomas Howard

Thomas Howard

Seattle, WA

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

The New QA Pyramid: Building Agentic Test Strategies from Scratch

The New QA Pyramid: Building Agentic Test Strategies from Scratch

Testing isn’t what it used to be. The old test pyramid; unit, integration, E2E; still matters. But it’s no longer enough. Modern software is intelligent. It generates content, reasons, adapts, and learns. That means QA isn’t just about checking if a button works anymore. It’s about

LLM-as-a-Judge: How to Teach AI to Test AI

LLM-as-a-Judge: How to Teach AI to Test AI

Artificial Intelligence is changing not just what we build, but also how we test it. Traditional QA has always relied on clear oracles: expected vs. actual results. But when you move into the world of Large Language Models (LLMs), the outputs aren’t simple booleans or numbers; they’re paragraphs

The April Win: My Unemployed Story

The April Win: My Unemployed Story

In 2022 I was out of work for seven months. It was the hardest stretch of my career (and life); and yeah, I know other people have had longer, tougher chapters. But this was mine. This is my story. The silence after job applications. The “we went in another direction”

AI in QA: The 3 Skills You’ll Need by 2027

AI in QA: The 3 Skills You’ll Need by 2027

For years, QA careers were built around manual regression, writing automation scripts, and keeping pipelines green. But the ground is shifting beneath us. Artificial Intelligence is already automating away the tasks we used to pride ourselves on. What’s left is a higher-order skill set that most QA professionals aren’

From Zero to Playwright: How to Bootstrap an Automation Repo That Scales

From Zero to Playwright: How to Bootstrap an Automation Repo That Scales

You’re starting a brand‑new automation repo that you expect to grow into an enterprise asset. The goal isn’t “get a few tests running.” It’s lay down habits and guardrails so new SDETs can onboard quickly, write clean tests, and avoid the typical graveyard of flaky E2E.

The Hidden Bottleneck of AI-Generated Code: Why QA Will Make or Break Your Velocity

The Hidden Bottleneck of AI-Generated Code: Why QA Will Make or Break Your Velocity

“While most focus on shipping more code, we’re leaving stealth to address the growing QA bottleneck caused by an increase in AI-generated code.” That line captures one of the most overlooked truths about the current AI boom: the bottleneck isn’t just engineering capacity anymore. It’s QA. AI

Building a QE-First Culture Without Ceremony or Bloat

Building a QE-First Culture Without Ceremony or Bloat

Quality Engineering has a branding problem. Too often, when leadership hears “QA” or “QE,” they picture process police. Heavy checklists. Endless signoffs. Test case bureaucracy. A tax on delivery speed. But the reality is this: a QE-first culture is the opposite of heavy process. Done right, it’s the single