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Thomas Howard

Thomas Howard

Seattle, WA

Director of Quality Engineering | Disruptor & thought leader in building, testing & scaling enterprise automation systems

The QA Pyramid Nobody Talks About

The QA Pyramid Nobody Talks About

Everyone knows the Test Automation Pyramid. You’ve seen the diagrams: unit tests at the base, service tests in the middle, UI tests at the top. It’s useful. It’s ubiquitous. And it helps teams think about cost, speed, and reliability. But here’s the thing: there’s a

Evolving the QE Maturity Model: Quality Beyond Testing

Evolving the QE Maturity Model: Quality Beyond Testing

This is the post that launched Break the Build. It’s for every engineer, tester, or leader who's felt the pain of broken QA processes — and wants something better. I’ve spent 15+ years in the trenches of testing and automation, and this is the truth I wish

GenAI Is Useless If You Don’t Have a Test Strategy First

GenAI Is Useless If You Don’t Have a Test Strategy First

I’ve seen this mistake play out time and time again. A team is underwater—drowning in flaky tests, patchy coverage, or endless test cycles. The pressure’s on to modernize, automate, and move faster. So they reach for the latest shiny object: 💡 “Let’s use GenAI to write our

Top 5 CI Anti-Patterns That Are Slowing You Down

Top 5 CI Anti-Patterns That Are Slowing You Down

Your CI pipeline is supposed to help you move faster and ship with confidence. But for many teams, CI has become a bottleneck instead of a launchpad—bloated with scripts, flaky tests, or noisy alerts. Instead of speeding you up, it saps engineering time and trust. Let’s break the

Let’s Be Honest: Traditional QA Is Broken

Let’s Be Honest: Traditional QA Is Broken

We don’t talk about this enough. Most QA teams aren’t set up to succeed. They're treated like safety nets — brought in at the tail end of a sprint, expected to find the bugs, rubber-stamp the release, and somehow “own quality.” But here’s the truth: QA