Work Blog

A collection of articles on software testing, test engineering, and Agile methodology by Gregory Gauthier.

Published Articles

Article	Topic
Testers As Explorers	Exploratory testing as chartered expedition, not aimless wandering
Agile, Or Whatever You Call It	The case for Agile practices beyond the buzzword
The Various Uses Of Vegetable Condiments In Testing	BDD, Gherkin, and the proper use of Cucumber
Five Essential Lessons	Key takeaways from Lessons Learned In Software Testing
The Categories Of Testing	Categorising tests by the kinds of facts they discover
The Perturbation Theory Of Exploratory Testing	Applying perturbation theory concepts to exploratory testing
What Is A Competent Tester?	Joel Spolsky on the distinction between testers and failed programmers
The Logic Of Software Testing	Formal reasoning methods testers use: modus ponens, modus tollens, induction, and abduction
Perfection And Testing	Why testing is about managing risk and confidence, not chasing perfection
Resources For Testers	Recommended books, blogs, and learning resources for software testers
What Makes Us Better	Whether AI tools like Claude change the kind of craft, not just the speed
Testing Telos	Four archetypal testing shapes, each the visible expression of a distinct engineering telos

Drafts

Article	Topic
The Uses and Abuses of Test Automation	Whether automation expands the craft of testing or quietly becomes a different craft
Agile Stories	User stories as actors, objects, and purposes — what this reveals about Agile
When Not To Test	Phronesis about where testing effort is wasted or actively harmful
The Oracle Problem	How we know what "correct" means, and how oracles conflict
Popper and the Risky Test	A good test as a falsifiable prediction — Popper's demarcation applied to suites
Regression as Institutional Memory	Test suites as codified belief; failures as either discovery or amnesia
On Flakiness	Heraclitus and the non-deterministic test — flakiness as a signal, not noise
Tacit Knowledge and the Testing Checklist	Polanyi on what experienced testers know but cannot hand to a checklist or an LLM
The Tester as Witness	The legal metaphor that dissolves the "tester as gatekeeper" confusion
Test Environments and Plato's Cave	Dev, staging, UAT, prod as caves with their own shadows
Testing Probabilistic Systems	Why the pyramid breaks on ML, and what shape replaces it
When Quality Becomes Quantity	Goodhart's Law and the degradation of testing metrics once they become targets

Structure

articles/
  published/   # Completed articles
  drafts/      # Work in progress
assets/
  clipart/     # Illustrative clipart
  general/     # Screenshots and diagrams
  memes/       # Memes referenced in articles
scripts/
  new-article          # Creates new article from title and opens in vim
  article-template.md  # Template used by the script

Creating New Articles

You can quickly create a new article with proper front-matter using the helper script:

scripts/new-article "The Telos of Test Automation"

This will:

• Generate a clean slug from the title
• Create the file in articles/drafts/
• Populate it with the current front-matter standard and template structure
• Open the file in vim (falls back to vi)

See scripts/article-template.md and GROK.md for the current conventions.