Quality, Culture, and Complexity: 18 Months of Insights from The Quality Engineering Newsletter
Over the past 18 months, the Quality Engineering Newsletter (QEN) has become a hub for exploring how quality is created, maintained, and lost in software systems. Looking back, I've identified key themes that have shaped our journey—and the journey of quality engineers.
What is Quality Engineering
During the first six months, I focused on laying out my stall for QEN and writing about my philosophy behind quality engineering. If you're new to QEN or quality engineering in general, then the following posts are the best way to get you up to speed and thinking like a Quality Engineer.
Here are the must-reads (Scroll to the bottom for a full list in series)
What do Quality Engineers do? - (Most popular post)
Quality Engineering - The study of how quality is created, maintained and lost
How to foster a culture of quality
Towards the end of 2023, I started to focus on how quality engineers foster a culture of quality within an organisation. This series of posts is a great place to start if you want to help your organisation think about quality in a much more holistic way rather than seeing it as something that can be inspected into a product through testing.
Here are the must-reads
Quality Engineering as philosophy, a framework and a tool (Most popular post)
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How complex software systems fail
In 2024, I started exploring why software systems fail, building on Dr Richard Cook's 18 characteristics of complex systems failure and applying them to software systems. This series of posts led me to develop my understanding of why we can't build perfect software that just works and, most importantly, what we can do about it. The 18 characteristics are something all quality engineers should learn and know well.
The final post in the series (map of content) ties together all the key ideas and techniques engineering teams should deploy within our organisation to help them better identify, minimise, and mitigate catastrophic complex software system failure.
Implementing even a few of the recommendations in this series could have helped CrowdStrike reduce the scope and impact of its July outage, potentially saving billions - I've got a talk in the pipeline on this incident, so watch for that.
Here are the must-reads
How software systems fail: Part 1 - Products (Most popular post)
Inspecting for quality
The end of 2024 was focused on something we within the software industry should be doing less of but not completely ignoring. Inspecting for quality is still essential, but as quality engineers, we need to understand better what it is, how it helps our engineering teams and what it doesn't do. There is still a lot of misunderstanding on the benefits of test automation and that it can replace all forms of manual feedback - it can't. The better we get at articulating what it is suitable for, the quicker we can focus our teams on spreading testing throughout the development life cycle.
Here are the must-reads and, by far, the most popular ever on QEN
The Key to Effective Test Automation: Start with Why, Not How
Can We Automate All the Things? Exploring the Limits of Testing in Software Systems
Uncertainty of Change
My final post of the year was a write-up of my talk, The Uncertainty of Change (Subscriber-Only Content). This talk draws ideas from my thoughts on quality engineering, how quality engineers can foster a culture of quality, why complex software systems fail, and the problem of relying too much on inspection of quality.
Anyone who's seen my other talks or readers of QEN will notice how I like to pull in a bit of psychology. In this post, I dive into how uncertainty affects our brains and bodies. I've made this part of the post free as developing my ability to understand how uncertainty affects me and how I can use it to my advantage has been one of the best skills I've developed over the last 3 years. If you're a quality engineer or just looking to understand yourself better, I can't recommend learning enough about uncertainty and how it affects your ability to think and perform.
Closing thoughts
I started QEN as an experiment, wondering if my approach to building quality and fostering a culture of excellence would resonate. 500+ readers later, I know it does. As I look ahead, I'm more committed than ever to helping quality engineers see more, do more, and be more—for themselves, their teams, and their organisations.
What resonated most with you in this journey? Let me know—I'd love to hear your thoughts.
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Further reading
What is Quality Engineering
- What is quality engineering?
- What do Quality Engineers do? - (Most popular post)
- Quality Engineering - The study of how quality is created, maintained and lost
- Nudging and boosting complex systems
- Building quality into products, processes and people
- Speed Vs Quality - Can you have both? (Subscriber-Only Content)
- What quality attributes do developers care about?
- How to build high-quality systems with Google's theory of quality
How to foster a culture of quality
- Quality Engineering as philosophy, a framework and a tool (Most popular post)
- Who should build a culture of quality?
- Three approaches to foster a culture of quality
- Faster delivering teams? Kill the test column (Subscriber-Only Content)
- Why is psychological safety important to software engineering teams?
How complex software systems fail
- How software systems fail: Part 1 - Products (Most popular post)
- How software systems fail - Part 2a - Processes
- How software systems fail - Part 2b - Processes
- How software systems fail - Part 2c - Processes
- How software systems fail: Part 3a - People
- How software systems fail: Part 3b - People
- How software systems fail - Part 3c - People
- How complex software systems fail - Map of Content (Subscriber-Only Content)
Inspecting for quality
- The Key to Effective Test Automation: Start with Why, Not How
- Why we failed at testability (Subscriber-Only Content)
- The Testing Unknown Unknowns
- Can We Automate All the Things? Exploring the Limits of Testing in Software Systems