The Three Mindsets of a Quality Engineer
How curiosity, humility, and empathy can shift your role from inspecting for quality to shaping a culture of quality - one interaction at a time.
How curiosity, humility, and empathy can shift your role from inspecting for quality to shaping a culture of quality, one interaction at a time.
In my concluding paragraph from What do Quality Engineers do? I said:
By applying a Quality Engineering mindset to make the system healthier, we can nudge and boost aspects to produce the quality attributes we want, which can be the seeds that grow into a culture of quality throughout an organisation.
In this post, I want to explore what a Quality Engineering mindset is, why it matters, and how it helps us move from being inspectors of quality to enabling our teams to build quality in.
What is a Mindset?
A mindset is a set of beliefs that shape how you perceive the world. That perception influences how you think, which in turn drives how you behave. You can think of mindset as the lens through which you interpret any situation.
Most of the time, we operate from a default, often unconscious mindset. Shaped by our experiences, environment, and even how we’re feeling that day. The risk is that this default can unintentionally reinforce patterns that lead to poor quality outcomes.
But when we make our mindset explicit (when we choose our lens), we can more deliberately influence our behaviour and impact. And when we do this as a team, our collective actions shape the system itself. In this way, mindsets can help us create more of the quality outcomes we want, and less of the ones we don’t.
The Three Mindsets That Help Quality Engineers Make Systems Healthier
There are three lenses, I believe, that are foundational for quality engineers:
Curiosity - There is always more to learn.
Humility - We don’t have all the answers.
Empathy - We need to support each other.
Let's take a closer look at each.
Curiosity - There is always more to learn
Curiosity is wanting to know things, but not having a specific purpose for it. It is a special form of information seeking that is internally motivated. Curiosity puts us into a learning mode that helps us to be open to discovering patterns, surprises, and possibilities. When we stay curious, we become better at noticing how quality emerges or is lost within our systems. Curiosity stops us from falling into the trap of thinking we know it all, which leads us to humility.
Humility - We don’t have all the answers
Humility often gets a bad reputation as people think it means being weak or submissive. But I like to think of it as knowing what you know, and most importantly, what you don't, and being willing to share that with others. Humility is recognising that we don't have all the answers, acknowledging that there will be gaps in our knowledge, and proactively seeking out information to address our blind spots. It's core to a growth mindset and recognising that our skills are not fixed, but rather something that can improve over time.
In practice, it’s about welcoming feedback, asking questions, and acknowledging uncertainty without letting it hurt our confidence or diminish others.
Empathy - We need to support each other
Empathy is the ability to share the feelings of another and allows us to take other people’s perspectives without judging them. Empathy is meeting people where they are, which allows you to feel their successes and failures. In contrast, sympathy is only recognising their failures and feeling sorry for them. Empathy is what creates safety in teams. It allows people to bring their concerns, ideas, mistakes, and questions, which is essential if we’re serious about improving quality.
How These Mindsets Help
The real power of these mindsets is in how they work together.
Curiosity drives us to learn and question the status quo.
Humility lets us share openly, ask for help, and learn from others.
Empathy helps us connect and collaborate in psychologically safe ways.
Together, they form a foundation for effective teamwork and the development of healthier socio-technical systems.
On May 13th, I’ll be speaking at Leeds Test Atelier, where I’ll share more about how the three mindsets of quality engineers show up in Psychological Safety. The Test Atelier is a fully independent, punk testing conference run for free at The Tetley in Leeds for a day of learning, collaborating and most importantly, laughs. Hope you can make it.
How to Practise These Mindsets in Daily Work
The thing about these mindsets is that they are not a one-off activity that you do on a Monday morning and you're set for the week, but something that we do little and often.
Here are some ways in which you can live these mindsets in your everyday work.
Being Curious in That There Is Always More To Learn
Ask ‘what if?’ questions in retros and reviews. Not to challenge decisions, but to explore possibilities.
Shadow team members in different roles. Even just once a sprint. Understanding how others experience quality helps deepen both your learning and strengthens relationships.
Run small experiments. Whether it's trying a new tool, pairing on an unfamiliar part of the codebase, or tweaking a test strategy.
Keep a curiosity log. Note down “I wonder…” thoughts during the day, and review them weekly to spot themes.
Create a ‘learning thread’ in team chats. Create a space for sharing articles, bugs affecting other similar teams, patterns noticed, or “how did we miss this?” reflections.
Showing Humility in That We Don't Have All The Answers
Say "I don’t know, but I’ll find out" openly. This models healthy uncertainty and sets the tone for others to do the same.
Regularly review and reflect on quality. Not just testing or coverage, but ask: What have we missed recently? What assumptions did we make?
Invite feedback proactively in discussions. For example, "Was this helpful?" or "What could I do differently next time?" Then, responding with gratitude and following up on how you will apply what they've shared helps them see that their views are valued and encourages them to do it more.
Facilitate blameless postmortems. By framing them around systems being complex, that failures are highly likely, and that high performers produce and learn from failures, rather than looking to blame others or cover them up.
Use 'we' language in retros and other group settings. For example, "We could have spotted that earlier,” "What can we do differently next time," instead of "You should have caught that."
Practising Empathy in That We Need to Support Each Other
Check in on people, not just on progress. Especially during incidents or high-stress work by asking "How are you doing?" and mean it.
Pair with others in the work they do. Not to teach, but to co-discover and understand how others approach quality.
Advocate for inclusive quality practices. By championing external stakeholder quality attributes with the team. For example, raising accessibility as a priority, even if it’s not yet on the roadmap or how QAs can get involved with automation, or Devs with exploratory testing.
Practice perspective-taking when making decisions. For example, "How might this affect our customer support team? "Would a junior Dev find this test helpful?"
Celebrate wins quietly and loudly. Acknowledge the time, energy, effort and emotional labour put into work, not just delivery. Even more so when the outcome wasn't as intended.
In Closing
As quality engineers, we will never fully understand every part of the systems we work in, and that’s okay. What matters is how we show up, how we work with others, and how we shape the environment around us.
When we lead with curiosity, humility, and empathy, we help create the conditions where quality can thrive. And when others see that in action, they often follow.
Like the saying goes:
Be the change you want to see in the system.