Hi, I’m Chris.

I’m a writer and operator who has spent more than two decades helping companies and teams improve testing and software quality. On this site I write about quality, testing, AI, and the systems around the people building software.

Over time, I’ve come to see quality as a systems problem. It doesn’t belong to a tester or a testing phase. It emerges from the way a product, the people building it, their processes and tools, company incentives, and customer needs interact. A bad outcome rarely has a single cause, and no test suite can compensate for everything happening around it.

My work is to understand those systems well enough to help people make better decisions about how they build software.

That perspective started forming early in my career, when I was often a test group of one. Although “tester” was my title, the work included supporting customers, debugging production systems, managing releases and filling whatever gaps appeared. Each responsibility gave me a different view of the product. Together, they made me a better tester and taught me to look beyond the boundaries of a role.

Since then, I’ve worked as an individual contributor, automation engineer, manager, and organizational leader. The scale has changed, but the questions have remained similar: What is this system producing? Why does the work happen this way? What information are we missing? Which behaviors are our tools and incentives encouraging?

That impulse also explains my interest in first-principles reasoning. I like building a model of how something works, questioning its assumptions, testing it against reality, and revising it when the evidence disagrees. Sometimes that leads to a better test. Sometimes it leads to rebuilding a process, changing a team’s direction, or deciding that the accepted solution is aimed at the wrong problem.

From 2018 to 2024, I served on the Board of Directors of the Association for Software Testing, including the final four years as its President. I also helped run several years of its CAST conference. Leading a volunteer organization and producing conferences made the systems around people especially visible: budgets, responsibilities, communication, speakers, sponsors, attendees, and the constant challenge of carrying knowledge forward as volunteers changed. It was community work, but it was also operator work.

Writing is how I slow down and examine what I’ve learned. It forces me to make my assumptions visible and build a clearer explanation of what’s happening. That’s why this site is called Shattered Illusions. Complex things often look simple from the outside. The closer you look, the more incomplete that first explanation becomes.

My interest in AI comes from the same place. In 2015, I wrote that we often get the relationship between humans and machines wrong. We treat technology as a replacement for human judgment when its greater value may be extending what people can do.

I also maintain TestingConferences.org, the open-source project I started in 2015 to help people find software testing conferences and workshops. Over the years it has become a community resource, a newsletter, and a sandbox where I can learn new technologies by putting them to work. Different project, same underlying question: how can people, tools, and processes work together to produce something useful?

Away from work, I’m a husband and dad, an occasional youth-sports coach, a former scuba instructor, a tinkerer with tools and workflows, and a reader who starts more books than he finishes.

The best way to understand how I think is through the things I’ve written: Start reading here.

Misc

• Bio: A biography and headshot for external reference.
• Publications: A short list of my writings and talks.
• My Testing Philosophy: A foundation for studying and improving my ideas on software testing.
• My Career Story: A story about my career along how much money I made at each stop along the way. Only available for members.
• NFTs, my collection.