Louise Woodhams
Automation & Test Lead
I've been testing for over 10 years and API testing is my favourite.
I believe testers/quality people are the BEST humans and always bring hope to my half glass empty soul.
Achievements
Certificates
Level up your software testing and quality engineering skills with the credibility of a Ministry of Testing certification.
Activity
earned:
Call for Insights turns 45
earned:
This Week in Quality
earned:
Call for Insights turns 45
thanked contributors on:
Earlier this year I had 8 weeks to deliver a project and the pressure started to hit. I spent an awful lot of my time giving feedback and felt like the bottleneck. We don't often talk a...
earned:
Together, We Find Solutions
Contributions
On the 15th of January 2026 myself and Ujjwal Kumar Singh joined a call and pressed record. We were curious to see what would happen. A few weeks later I’d done the same with Neil Taylor and Clare ...
"I've configured things you people wouldn't believe. IIS settings on multiple local builds. I watched Test pipelines glitter in the dark near the QA Release gate. All those moments will be lost in ...
I can across Maaike Brinkhof's most recent blog post this morning and from the front cover picture I knew I was in for the read I needed. It is always comforting to come across someone articulating...
The deliberate use of understanding and perspective-taking as a core testing skill, applied both to the people a product is built for and the people it is built with. For users, it means stepping into their shoes to anticipate how a real person will experience an application. For colleagues, it means reading the moods, communication styles, and unspoken signals of developers and other team members to build trust and choose how and when to deliver feedback.It is often paired with an awareness of boundaries, since absorbing others' frustration without limits can lead to exhaustion. For example: raising a possible bug in a private message rather than calling it out publicly; noticing a teammate is having a difficult day and adjusting your approach; or testing a feature against how a non-technical user would actually behave rather than an idealised path.
Is empathy a nice extra, or the engine behind good quality work?
A reflective “wins” episode that turns everyday progress into momentum, and reminds us to log the good stuff, not just the problems.
In episode 134 of TWIQ, Louise Woodhams shared her win: she found a defect before it hit production. This particular issue was related to permissions, and if it had gone out, it would have given ev...
Writing Automation has made me realise after 10 plus years I am actually a good tester.I am however possibly the worst developer known to man and should not be allowed.Life giveth and it taketh awa...
I got this little ladybird friend last week to celebrate/mark it being 10 years this year of me being a software tester.I did wade into this career by accident and for the most part it feel like th...