100 Quotes · Wisdom · Humor · Inspiration
Awesome QA Quotes
for Every Tester
Wisdom, philosophy and humor from the greatest minds in software quality — Dijkstra, Kent Beck, Deming, Cem Kaner and the global QA community.
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Testing shows the presence, not the absence, of bugs.
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Philosophy
Testing shows the presence, not the absence, of bugs.
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Philosophy
Quality is not an act, it is a habit.
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Humor
If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
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Philosophy
The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of meeting the schedule has been forgotten.
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Philosophy
A tester's job is not to prevent the programmers from putting bugs in, but to find the ones they put in.
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Philosophy
No amount of testing can prove a software right; a single test can prove a software wrong.
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Mindset
The best testers are the ones who never stop being curious.
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Philosophy
Quality is everyone's responsibility.
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Philosophy
Testing is questioning a product in order to evaluate it.
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Philosophy
If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?
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Mindset
Every bug is a story about a tester who cared enough to find it.
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Automation
Automated testing doesn't replace human thinking. It replaces human repetition.
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Philosophy
Testing is the engineering rigor of software development.
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Automation
Test early, test often, test automatically.
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Philosophy
The goal is not to eliminate all bugs. The goal is to eliminate the ones that matter.
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Automation
A unit test is not a proof. It is an experiment.
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Automation
Confidence in code comes from tests, not comments.
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BDD
The more human readable your tests are, the more valuable they become as documentation.
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Strategy
Shift left testing means catching problems when they cost less to fix.
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Strategy
The test pyramid is not a commandment. It is a guideline for thinking about risk.
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Humor
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
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Humor
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
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Philosophy
All bugs are shallow given enough eyes.
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Automation
The most dangerous bug is the one that makes your tests pass when they shouldn't.
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Philosophy
A bug discovered in production is worth ten found in development.
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Mindset
Every bug found by the QA team is a gift. Every bug found by the user is a lesson.
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Mindset
The first rule of bug fixing: understand the problem before you touch the code.
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Philosophy
A bug is a failure of imagination — someone didn't consider that case.
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Humor
The most common mistake in debugging is looking where the bug isn't.
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Humor
It's not a bug — it's an undocumented feature.
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Automation
A flaky test is worse than no test. It teaches you not to trust your test suite.
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Automation
Automation is a tool, not a goal. The goal is quality, confidence and speed.
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Automation
The only way to keep a test suite fast is to keep it small.
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Automation
Tests should be the first documentation a new engineer reads, not the last.
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Automation
Make it green before you make it clean.
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Automation
An automated test that never fails is either very good or completely useless.
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Automation
The best regression test is the one that runs itself.
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Automation
Selenium is not a test framework. It is a browser automation tool. The test framework is what you build around it.
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Automation
Don't automate a bad process. Fix the process first, then automate it.
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Automation
Test code is production code. It deserves the same love and refactoring.
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Philosophy
Quality is not something you inspect into a product. It is something you build in.
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Mindset
A great tester doesn't just find bugs. They find the bugs that matter.
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Mindset
The mindset of a tester is: assume nothing, question everything.
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Humor
Good testers are pessimists by profession and optimists by nature.
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Humor
The best QA engineers are the ones who can say "I broke it" with a smile.
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Mindset
Never stop asking "what if". That is the tester's superpower.
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Philosophy
Testing is not QA. QA is a culture. Testing is one way to support that culture.
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Mindset
The best time to find a bug is before the customer does. The second best time is right now.
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Humor
Testers don't break software. Software was already broken. We just reveal the truth.
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Philosophy
You can't polish a product into quality. You have to build it in.
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Agile
In agile teams, quality is not the QA's job. It is everyone's job.
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CI/CD
Continuous testing is not about testing continuously. It is about getting continuous feedback.
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Agile
Done means tested. If it isn't tested, it isn't done.
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Agile
The best time to write a test is before you write the code.
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CI/CD
Move fast and break things — then fix them before shipping.
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CI/CD
Every deployment should be boring. Boring deployments mean good tests.
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CI/CD
A CI pipeline that takes 45 minutes is a CI pipeline nobody runs locally.
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CI/CD
The goal of continuous integration is not to find bugs faster. It is to make it safe to change things.
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Automation
Code without tests is legacy code.
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Agile
Retrospectives without action items are just storytelling.
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Humor
QA Engineer walks into a bar. Orders 1 beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 99999999 beers. Orders -1 beers. Orders asdfjkl; beers.
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Humor
A QA engineer never sleeps. They just continuously check if their dreams have any edge cases.
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Humor
The developer says it works on their machine. So we ship their machine.
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Humor
Test in production. What could go wrong?
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Humor
99 little bugs in the code, 99 little bugs. Take one down, patch it around. 127 little bugs in the code.
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Humor
My code compiles. Therefore, it works. — said every developer moments before the QA found 17 bugs.
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Humor
Testing is easy. Understanding what you are supposed to be testing is hard.
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Humor
Every production bug is a test you forgot to write.
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Philosophy
The best feature is the one the user doesn't notice — because it just works.
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Humor
Code review: two developers agreeing that neither of them wrote the bug.
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Philosophy
Make it work, make it right, make it fast — in that order.
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Philosophy
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
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Agile
Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.
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Automation
Write tests until fear is transformed into boredom.
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Strategy
The sooner you start testing, the sooner you start learning about the system.
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Automation
A test that is difficult to write is a signal that the design needs improvement.
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Philosophy
Technical debt is the sum of all the shortcuts that seemed like a good idea at the time.
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Mindset
Exploratory testing is not an absence of method. It is the presence of method applied in real time.
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Philosophy
The goal of a tester is not to find bugs. It is to provide information that helps decision-making.
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Strategy
Risk is the product of probability and impact. Prioritize your tests accordingly.
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Career
An SDET who can't code is a tester. An SDET who can't test is a developer. You need to be both.
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Career
The best developers I know are great testers. The best testers I know write great code.
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Career
Your career in QA is defined not by the bugs you find but by the quality you help ship.
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Automation
Don't just automate what you can. Automate what you should.
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Automation
Every pull request is a chance to make the codebase better or worse. The test suite is how you know which.
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Career
Learn to say "I don't know" — the best engineers say it most often and learn fastest.
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Mindset
The willingness to ask "can it break?" separates a developer mindset from a tester mindset.
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Mindset
A skilled tester asks better questions than a skilled developer provides answers.
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Career
The best place to grow your career is at the intersection of coding and quality.
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Automation
Test automation is a craft. Treat it like one.
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Philosophy
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
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Philosophy
A production outage is the universe's way of telling you your test coverage is insufficient.
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Culture
The loudest voice in any meeting should be the test results, not the loudest person.
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Automation
Sleep well at night. Ship with confidence. Automate your tests.
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Automation
The job of the test suite is to make you brave, not cautious.
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Mindset
A good QA team is the reason users never know how close to disaster they came.
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Philosophy
Measure quality by the number of things that don't need to be said.
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Philosophy
In God we trust. All others must bring data.
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Philosophy
The most dangerous phrase in engineering is "we've always done it this way."
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Philosophy
Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of intelligent effort.
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