Agilish

Given that UAT is reserved for external-facing testing against market infrastructure and external partners, your internal teams need somewhere else to test. That environment is QA — and the name is where things start to break down. UAT is a term almost everyone understands. Say it in a room full of developers, business analysts, project managers, or regulators, and they all broadly know what you mean: the environment where acceptance testing happens before a release goes live. QA does not carry the same shared understanding. Ask teams across different systems or business lines what they call their pre-UAT environment, and you will get a different answer from each one: SIT (System Integration Testing), INT (Integration), TEST, UAT2, STAGE, or simply "the lower environment." These are all names for the same concept, but the lack of consistent terminology creates real operational friction. When teams across multiple systems are trying to coordinate an end-to-end test,...

AI writes the code, so we need fewer developers. And if we need fewer developers, the thinking goes, we probably need fewer testers too. The software just…works. That story is wrong . Not slightly wrong. Fundamentally and dangerously wrong. AI is changing how software gets built. It is not changing the fact that software is used by humans, that humans make mistakes, that systems fail under pressure, and that every new line of code — whether written by a person or generated by a model — introduces new ways for things to go wrong. If anything, the rise of AI-generated software makes rigorous, human-led testing more important, not less. AI Makes Testing Better — It Does Not Make It Optional None of this is an argument against using AI in testing. AI is already making testing faster and more thorough. It can generate test data at scale, suggest regression suites, identify patterns in defect history, and reduce the mechanical burde...

I value trust and honesty as core beliefs. I have always been transparent in work and in my personal life because I have nothing to hide. I do not lie, cheat, or steal — so why wouldn't I be? With that context, this post is not an April Fool. But I do want to share the best April Fool that ever got me. It got thousands — if not millions — of us. Every year I think about it, remember my friend Erik and his dad, and I smile. 1985 The year was 1985. Erik and I were baseball-crazy teenagers getting ready for our first freshman high school baseball season. I was finishing dinner with my parents when the white rotary phone in my mom's kitchen rang. "It's over! It's over! Baseball as we know it is over." Erik was on the other end, more excited than I had ever heard him. He went on and on about a new pitcher the Mets had found who threw 168 miles per hour with pinpoint accuracy. The Mets would win the World Series — nobody could beat a team with pitching li...