How Many Charters Is Enough

Every sponsor eventually asks two questions: how long will exploring take, and how will we know when you're done? The honest answer to both used to collapse into 'it depends.' It no longer has to.

Right, Exactly

I said the quiet part out loud on a vendor call, expecting pushback. Instead I got two words that confirmed the whole argument this series has been building.

The Architect Who Isn't There

Asking the architect how many real paths a system has works beautifully, right up until there's no architect left who remembers. Here's what to do instead.

Eleven Loops, Not Eleven Hundred

A team had thousands of test cases and still couldn't find the bug. An architect asked one question and the real number of things worth testing dropped by two orders of magnitude.

Whose Definition of Broken

A checkbox got quietly removed because it looked like clutter. It took months to discover the enterprise workflows that had been silently built around it.

Wandering Is Not a Method

Exploratory testing has a credibility problem, and it isn't the practice's fault. It's what happens when wandering borrows the name without doing the work the name implies.

The Human Fiduciary

Nobody wrote a test for the moment a tester connects a stray delay to a silent inventory failure. That pivot has a name, and it isn't a legal one, but it's real.

The Fuzzy Map Lines in Exploring

Property-based testing, fuzzing, chaos engineering, differential testing — four technical communities that never coordinated, all quietly proving the same point about where automation ends and judgment begins.

The Loop and the Label

Regression Testing: Labeled by What It Produces, Not What It's Meant For

The Fire That Never Started

Exploratory Testing 2026, Craft in the Age of AI & Deep Stack Dividends

Prescription Before Diagnosis

The Third Gate

Most automation readiness checklists have a rule that quietly disqualifies the exact thing AI is best at. Here's the fix.

The Drift Audit

Tenure Theater: Why Your AI Tool Rollout Is Stalled (And It's Not the Tool)

The Load Test Is Dead. Long Live the Load Test.

A performance engineer's hypothesis about what agentic AI is actually doing to your infrastructure, and why nobody is watching.

The Puja Can't Be Ceremonial

A new CEO once asked me who to believe. My answer changed how I think about leadership forever.

The Dividends You Stopped Paying Yourself

Most organizations are sitting on high-yield technical assets they've never been able to fund. AI just changed the economics.

You're Not Behind on AI. You're Optimizing the Wrong Model.

A capital strategy for leaders who are done explaining why the layoffs aren't working.

The New Beautiful Testing

The New Beautiful Testing, QA Craft in the Age of AI