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leadership

Leadership insights for building high-performing QA and QE teams — from scaling test strategy to fostering a culture of ownership, speed, and trust.

How to Reset a Burned-Out QA Team That’s Lost Trust with Devs

How to Reset a Burned-Out QA Team That’s Lost Trust with Devs

It doesn’t start with a blown release. It starts with eye rolls. Developers stop tagging QA early. QA stops raising bugs in Slack because “no one listens anyway.” Every stand-up turns into passive status updates, not collaboration. By the time leadership notices, it’s not just the product that’

The Meeting Most VPs Never Run: A Defect Post-Mortem for Leadership Decisions

The Meeting Most VPs Never Run: A Defect Post-Mortem for Leadership Decisions

Every engineering leader loves a good post-mortem; as long as it’s about code. But the hardest, most valuable post-mortem your company will ever run is the one you never put on the calendar: the Defect Post-Mortem for Leadership Decisions. The Hidden Bug in the Org Chart We’ve all

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

From Selenium to Playwright: A Safe and Scalable Migration Blueprint for Modern QA

From Selenium to Playwright: A Safe and Scalable Migration Blueprint for Modern QA

For a decade, Selenium was the undisputed standard for UI test automation. It powered thousands of QA organizations, from scrappy startups to global enterprises. But what carried us through the 2010s has become the anchor of the 2020s. Scaling Selenium today feels like running a marathon in ankle weights: slow

360° Test Intelligence Playbook for QE Directors

360° Test Intelligence Playbook for QE Directors

Blunt truth: If you don’t instrument usage and wire it into CI, you’re guessing. This playbook turns production reality into test strategy, automation ROI, and faster, safer releases. 0) Outcomes (What “Good” Looks Like) * Automate the right things: High‑usage, high‑criticality, deterministic flows. * Explore the right things:

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

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