Quality assurance guides — processes, tools, and techniques for building and running an effective QA practice.
Testing
Test management tooling sits in an awkward spot for most engineering teams. It has to serve QA engineers who live in it all day, developers who open it only to triage a failing run, and product managers who want a dashboard that tells them whether the release is safe. Tools
QA
Having a contract with a QA agency doesn't mean you have QA coverage. The difference between a productive outsourcing relationship and a frustrating one is workflow — how work flows between your team and theirs, how information gets communicated, and how you handle the inevitable coordination friction. Most outsourcing
Testing
Cause-effect graphing is the technique that decision tables grew out of. It was formalized by Myers in 1979 as a systematic way to capture the logical relationships between system inputs and outputs — and then mechanically derive a decision table from that model. Most teams skip straight to decision tables
Testing Tools
PostHog is unusual in the analytics tooling landscape: it's open-source, self-hostable, and combines session replay, product analytics, feature flags, A/B testing, and error tracking in a single platform. For QA engineers, this combination means behavioral analysis and experimentation infrastructure live in the same place. This
Database Testing
Database testing has its own equivalence partition structure driven by database constraints, SQL semantics, and the specific behaviors of NULL, type boundaries, and referential integrity. This post covers how to apply BVA and EP to database layer testing specifically. Database Column Constraints as Partition Sources Every column constraint defines partitions:
Bug Tracking
Bugzilla has been around since 1998. Netscape built it to track bugs in its browser. Mozilla maintained it. And somehow, in 2026, it's still running in thousands of organizations. Not because it's flashy — it isn't. But because it works, it's free, and
Test Design
Boundary value analysis (BVA) isn't a single technique — it's a family of related methods with different coverage philosophies. The version you learned in your testing certification is probably 2-point BVA: test at the boundary and just inside it. But 3-point BVA, robust BVA, and
Bug Tracking
The Jira vs. everything-else debate never ends, and for good reason. Jira is powerful but expensive and complex. Alternatives keep emerging with simpler interfaces and better pricing. Backlog.io (made by Nulab) is one of the more serious challengers, especially for development and QA teams at small to mid-
Testing
Knowing the theory of pairwise testing is one thing. Actually generating test suites is another. The good news: the tooling is mature, free, and takes under an hour to set up. The less-good news: each tool has quirks, and the documentation ranges from sparse to nonexistent in places. This
QA
The "build vs buy" question for QA is one that every growing engineering team eventually faces. Hire a QA team internally, or outsource to an agency?
Testing
Orthogonal array testing is one of those techniques that gets mentioned in ISTQB study materials and promptly forgotten because the explanation is usually too abstract to be actionable. It shouldn't be. Orthogonal arrays are a concrete, table-driven approach to combinatorial test design with a clean mathematical basis
Testing
Decision tables are a test design artifact. Their value is only fully realized when the rules they define become automated tests that run on every build.