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Code reviews: what are they good for?

Before you outsource code reviews to an agent, ask what they're really for. You could be losing hidden work.

What the Dashboard won't tell you

Confidence is a visibility problem. Load is something else. Both matter, and collapsing them costs the one happening to people

Stop Measuring Fast. Start Measuring Better

AI is moving PR throughput. But throughput isn't the whole story. When the bottleneck moves, the pressure shows up somewhere else. Measure better, not faster.

The Split We Agreed to Pay For

How building a quality chatbot taught me that discovery and testing were never separate disciplines

Everyone owns quality. Nobody knows what that means

When organisations cut QA headcount, they redistribute the work without redistributing the definition — and most of the time, nobody notices until production does.

Contract Testing Isn't the Hard Part

Product teams mostly know the value of contract testing. The hard part is implementation. Where do they start? A reusable AI playbook — built on risk reasoning — can give them that starting point in minutes.

QC newsletter 41: I've been writing. Just not sending

A round-up of quality coach articles, events and articles from the quality coach book and community.

Staying Sane in a Post Modern Tech world

Before I start, I want to be clear. 2025 was an awesome year. I got to attend some incredible conferences such as Yow!, Agile Testing Days, Testing Talks. Plus, I got to attend a Kent Beck workshop kindly hosted by my work.  I co-led a tutorial with Fiona Charles

My Genie Got It Wrong: Evaluating LLMs for a RAG Chatbot

How do you choose the right LLM for a RAG chatbot? I compared Llama 70B, 405B, and GPT-4 across 100 iterations. The AI agent's recommendation was wrong.

Introducing the Quality Coach Researcher

I wrote The Quality Coach's Handbook as a practical guide, something you can pick up for an answer when a question at work arises. Now I wonder if a chatbot could supplement the book by quickly locating relevant content? I decided to build the Quality Coach Researcher, an

The girl in the purple jeans

The girl in the purple jeans plucks at her embroidered threads. The sun shines on her face, blessing her. She plucks a flower and twirls it between her fingers. How can she know that in that moment, she’s to become a symbol of a time when no fear exists,

Have Your Slice and Eat It: Boost Quality with Vertical Story Slicing

How product features are sliced into smaller work items has a big impact on quality. Slice your epics well, and quality will follow.

There are no bad testers only bad systems

Avoid labelling people as good or bad testers, focus on how to improve the system

Why Software Teams Need Speed Limits

Reducing the speed limit before a known bottleneck allows traffic to flow smoothly. While we feel we're going slower, we actually get to our destination faster. The same principles apply in software engineering.