What Quality Engineers Actually Care About: Insights from 30 essays, 21 Linkys, and 33k+ Reads
What a year of writing, reading, and reflection reveals about the state of Quality Engineering
Being nearly the end of the year this weeks post is a look at what patterns I can see after 30 essays, 21 Linky posts and 33K+ views across the Quality Engineering Newsletter (QEN).
If you’re new here, welcome. QEN is a space for thoughtful conversations about quality, complexity, and how better software gets built.
One of the things I wanted for this newsletter is not to be about hot-takes, polarising views or click-bait through negativity, but deep thinking and working through what quality engineering is and how we can create better software systems.
This year I wanted to try and post once a week and apart from 2 reposts I managed to post almost 50 times. To help me achieve this I brought in a new format with Linky, sharing what I’ve been reading and what the industry cares about in quality engineering (QE).
So what have all those posts shown me? Well, there were a few standouts that really seemed to strike a chord with people, which all clustered around 5 themes.
Misconceptions still dominate the QE conversations
Three of my top-read posts were:
For me this shows that people are tired of binary thinking and want clarity about what quality engineering is and how we go about building quality in. It shows that QE still has a bit of an identity crisis with oversimplified narratives.
This is what I was seeing, and still do, and why I wanted to start this newsletter. I hope I’ve helped push that conversation along in some way, but I think we’ve still got some way to go until we have an industry-wide adopted view of quality engineering.
If misconceptions influence our thinking, then role clarity shapes how we behave.
Role clarity is a major pain point
One of my highest-performing posts only came out a few weeks ago:
But also earlier in the year:
I think this really highlights that people want to know what good looks like when operating as a quality engineer. They are looking for pathways grounded in lived experiences, not just training courses or certifications.
Once people have developed a better understanding of their roles, the next question is what frameworks help them operate effectively.
Readers are looking for frameworks
People are looking to get better at what quality engineering is and move away from it being a purely rebranded testing activity. Essentially: how can you implement quality engineering and what are the models that help you do it?
The power of frameworks are that they help you work through the uncertainty of how to operate in complex systems. The key is that no one framework is perfect for any given situations. You need a toolbox of them and experience with applying and adjusting them to your context. So start collecting them and finding opportunities to try them out. This is why learning the patterns of how your systems operates is so important. As it helps you see which framework works best or most likely, parts of frameworks.
Then once you’ve got an idea on how to operate, understanding industry trends helps you see how others are practicing quality engineering.
Conference round-ups are popular
Top three talks from TestBash 2025
Top 5 Talks from Oredev 2025
Lean Agile Scotland 2025: Lessons for Quality Engineers
Readers are enjoying the takeaways from conferences and actionable insights. A highlight for me this year was Oredev for its sheer breadth of topics, but making sense of it all can be tough.
I find my conference takeaways as a good exercises on figuring which ideas resonated with me and judging by the readership it resonates with others too.
Learning about the industry trends from conferences is one way to see how quality engineering is progressing, the other is through regular snap shots of the industry through linkys.
Linky - A view into quality engineering
Top 3 Linkys of the year:
Linkys are my way to share what’s caught my eye that week and what it means for quality engineering. It looks like they are popular with readers too. I’ve found it a great way to showcase others thinking that supports quality engineering and new sources for people to follow to continue developing their knowledge.
I like to think of the links I share and short takeaways as the weak signals shaping our industry.
Expect a bumper edition of Linky soon where I round up the best insights of the year.
Close
Big thank you to all the subscribers. Your messages and comments really help keep me motivated and publishing every week. If there was one post I enjoyed writing the most it has to be Quality is Emergent. This crystallises what quality engineering is and, for me, helps explain what quality engineering is all about:
You cannot force an emergent property into existence. But you can influence the environment it emerges from. That is what quality engineering is all about. It’s not bug catching, adding more tests, or promising certainty where none exists.
It is learning how your system behaves, understanding what people value and shaping the conditions that make good outcomes more repeatable.
Because in complex software systems, quality is not something you can build, it is something you cultivate.
Next year I want to dig deeper into frameworks that help teams think clearly in complex environments and hopefully sharing more of what it means to be a principal tester.
Here’s to 2026.