This episode is about the struggle to explain, measure, and name the work testers and quality advocates actually do — especially when traditional labels and metrics fall short.
Links to stuff we mentioned during the pod:
Some resources explaining the Shift-Left concept (Perplexity link)
00:00 - Intro
01:11 - Welcome & "woke" testing 😳
03:15 - QA, QE, Testing… whatever we call it, how do we measure if we're doing a good job?
03:44 - Vernon’s first experience with testing metrics: more = better?
05:00 - Defect Detection Rate enters the chat
06:41 - Rich reverse engineers quality skills needed in the AI era
10:54 - How do we know if we’re doing any of this well?
12:40 - Trigger warning: the topic of coverage is incoming 😅
16:54 - Bugs in production
21:09 - Automation metrics: flakiness, pass rates, and execution time
24:29 - Can you measure something that didn’t happen? (Prevention metrics)
27:43 - Do DORA metrics actually measure prevention?
32:03 - Here comes Jerry!
33:50 - The one metric the business cares about...
36:23 - QA vs QE: whose “quality” are we "assuring"?
39:25 - What's the story behind the numbers?
48:29 - Rich brings in Shift Left Testing
50:14 - Metrics that reach beyond engineering
53:14 - Rich gets a new perspective on QE and the business
56:50 - Who does this work? Testers? QEs? Or someone else?