Notes from the anvil of software quality
Quality is forged,
not inspected in.
Agile promised speed. What it quietly cost was craft — and quality assurance paid the bill. This is a record of where the practice breaks, why it keeps breaking, and what re-forging it actually looks like.
The Thesis
A blacksmith does not “test” a blade after it’s made. The craft is in the folding, the tempering, the thousand small decisions before the edge ever meets a target. Quality assurance was meant to work the same way — woven into the making, not bolted on at the end.
Somewhere in the industry’s rush toward two-week sprints and velocity charts, QA got reduced to a checkbox at the bottom of a board. Testers became ticket-closers. Craft became compliance. And when quality quietly erodes, nobody notices until the blade snaps in someone’s hand.
This blog exists to name the specific practices — inside agile teams, inside real sprints — that hollow out QA’s value, and to argue for treating it as the skilled trade it always was. These three paragraphs do NOT need an Additional CSS class — they inherit their styling automatically from being inside .qr-manifesto.
From the Anvil
Recent Entries
No. 001
Why ‘just add it to the sprint’ is where QA goes to die
Squeezing testing into the same two weeks as development isn’t agility — it’s asking the smith to quench the blade before it’s finished forging.
Agile failure
No. 002
The definition of done that no one defends
When ‘done’ quietly stops including ‘tested,’ QA becomes the department that argues with velocity — and loses.
Team Dynamics
No. 003
Automation is a tool, not an apprenticeship
Chasing coverage numbers has replaced the slower work of actually understanding what could break, and why.
Craft