An Individual Contributor (IC) is a role where your impact mainly comes from doing the work yourself, not from managing other people. A simple way to think about it:An IC is like a senior person on the team who still builds things. They may review work, help others, or influence decisions, but they are not responsible for running the team.In Quality Engineering, an IC might: Test or investigate issues Improve tooling or checks Review work and point out risks They create impact mostly through their own work and judgment, not through people management.

Hanisha Arora shares a real-life example of an AI workflow. It sounds cool! It got me thinking that we need more examples of AI workflows. Do share when you find them.

Hanisha shares an essential reason to write and keep writing.

AI's impact on quality generalists vs quality specialists

Cassandra H. Leung shares the following in Module 4, Lesson 4 of the Software Quality Engineering Certificate (SQEC). "One thing that people can start doing straight away is to talk about qualit...

I haven’t really set goals since 2022. I set themes instead. 2025 was about exploration. Saying yes to things I would normally avoid. Doing at least one thing every month that I’d usually say no t...

Reframe your testing from fixing bugs to understanding systems through small, deliberate habits that shape how you think and decide.

Impact statements describe the outcome of your work rather than the task you performed. Instead of listing what you did, they show what changed because you did it. They make your contribution clear, measurable, and easy for others to understand.Example: Task: Created API test suite Impact statement: Improved release confidence by reducing post-deployment API failures

The STAR model is a simple structure for explaining real experiences. It helps you tell a clear, focused story by breaking it into four parts:  Situation – The context or problem you were facing Task – What you were responsible for Action – What you actually did  Result – What changed because of it  Example:  Situation: A regression cycle kept slipping because no one trusted the test results.  Task: Improve the reliability of the suite.  Action: Identified the top flaky tests, stabilised them, and moved the suite into CI.  Result: The team cut regression time by half and stopped rechecking everything manually.