Richard Adams
Richard Adams
Senior Test Analyst
He / Him
Passionate about quality & testing. Creator of Threat Agents card game and regularly found chatting cyber security.
🎂 MoTaBirthday | March 14, 2019
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Meet at MoTaCon 2026
We love a good TWiQ episode that celebrates the wins. And in today's episode we did just that. So here goes, we celebrated the following wins...
Diana Dromey ran her first ever 10k, goin...
10 Jul
The lineup is out and oh my... how exciting is it?These are the contributors we've announced publicly... but let me tell you something. Every single person walking through the Brighton Dome doors b...
19 May
We're very happy to have Richard Adams joining us in Brighton once again, for a fantastic workshop about RCA (Root Cause Analysis)!RCA is a powerful, yet underused, tool to help us build better qua...
23 Apr
Rich Adams asks:Would you prefer to eat a lot of one snack at one, seeing how two snacks mix together or sampling the full bowl of snacks?
I'm a big fan of pair-wise testing... sorry I mean pairin...
23 Mar
An exploration of how to think about templating to enable others
2 Jun
Explore how testers are blending AI with human judgment to improve exploratory testing, sharpen risk thinking, and stay accountable for quality in 2026.
9 Jan
Day in the Life Testing
A testing technique in which a tester or developer spends an extended period using the software from the perspective of a specific user role, completing realistic tasks and observing how the system behaves under real-world conditions. The approach surfaces issues that scripted tests tend to miss, particularly around usability, unexpected user behaviour, and the gap between how a system was intended to work and how it is actually used. It is especially valuable for understanding complex permission and role-based systems, and for exposing friction that only becomes visible when someone is navigating the software as a genuine user rather than as a tester looking for defects.
Escalation
An issue reported by a customer to the support team that requires involvement from the engineering team. This may be because the issue is a defect or require deeper diagnosis & analysis by engineers (developers or tester) to understand the behaviour that the customer is experiencing and advise them on steps to resolve their problem. Companies often have policies or Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that define how quickly engineering teams must respond to and resolve escalations from customers.
Behaviour Driven Development (BDD)
Behaviour Driven Development is an agile approach to delivering software with the goal of the developers, testers and product owners or business analysts collaborate to have a shared understanding of intended behaviour through examples. These examples can then be formulated into test scenarios and automated to provide evidence that the desired behaviours are implemented and working successfully. These automated test scenarios are typically written in a human readable format known as Gherkin. The three phases of BDD are Discovery, Formulation and Automation. Note that tests written in Gherkin are not inherently BDD test cases as this requires completion the Discovery and Formulation phases.
Specification by Example (SBE)
Specification by Example is an agile approach to delivering software where the requirements are defined as executable specifications. Teams identify the scope of the work and illustrate the intended behaviour through examples. The key examples are refined into executable specifications which are then turned into automated tests. These test can then act as living documentation for the software. In order to provide human readable tests for the living documentation, tests may be written in Gherkin based frameworks or other frameworks such as Concordion or FitNesse. The methodology has significant overlap with BDD and ATDD.
Attack
An attacker who uses an exploit to perform a malicious action and make an attack.
Comments
(8)
AMA about Leadership
My biggest challenge when I was in a leadership role was that it wasn't a position of authority. Whilst I was the leader on how to think about quality and testing, I had no power to implement something. How would you lead in this situation?
AMA about Full Snack Testing
Would you prefer to eat a lot of one snack at one, seeing how two snacks mix together or sampling the full bowl of snacks?
How do you engage stakeholders, such as devs & product, with the findings from your exploratory testing session?
Thanks Simon! Some great ideas to help me with debriefs. I've liked PQIP and is something that I shared with dev teams on exploratory testing.
AMA about Exploratory Testing
How do you engage stakeholders, such as devs & product, with the findings from your exploratory testing session?
Making registration easy: Understanding the complexities of online forms
There is also the Scunthorpe problem where validation can reject legitimate values when providing an address. Even when not with a word, it is quite plausible that a word deemed offensive by the team may be a common term in another language, or the user is in Britain where we do love our ridiculous village names.
This Week in Quality
Share your week’s highlights, challenges, and lessons in quality
This Week in Quality
3 days ago
Learner completed your lesson
Lesson 6 of Everyday security testing: A practical guide to getting started
Community Star
3 days ago
