Why quality engineering?

Having worked in the software engineering space for 20 years and for much of that as a Software Tester, I've always had one question driving me forward, How can we build better software?

For a lot of that time, I believed that if we could catch as many of the issues in our systems before they got to our users, we could deliver high-quality software. Unfortunately, this only worked if you had an army of testers, and the pace at which the system changed could be measured in months and years.

But we now live in a world where software can be changed in days, hours and even minutes. We need a way for software teams to test as fast as the software can be modified. The solution appeared to be test automation, specifically User Interface (UI) automation. If we automate our testing, we can likely catch more issues quicker.

At first, UI automation helped, and the need to have more testers…