Stuart Thomas
Stuart Thomas
Engineering Leadership Consultant
He / Him
Duck enthusiast, technology leader, and quality advocate focused on building high-autonomy teams and sustainable delivery.
🎂 MoTaBirthday | December 20, 2022
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This past couple of weeks I have been thinking a lot about how I show up for the MoT EM Chapter community. I love asking questions and I love books, so I decided to ask a question about books to se...
15 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 are excited to welcome Stuart Thomas to the MoTaCon stage for his session Testing the untestable: building a strategy for testing AI.
This isn't a coding tutorial, it’s a strategic playbook for ...
7 May
Loved recording the 404 talk for the SQEC Certification module on Monitorability, Observability, Testability. It was great to think about how these often forgotten areas of quality can be so impact...
18 Feb
Integrate monitoring, observability, and alerting into the core quality engineering process to ensure systems are as diagnosable as they are functional
21 Apr
63% of you were not aware of the existence of the Staff Quality Engineer role
24 Apr
Transform your team’s delivery by learning how small, consistent improvements in testing, automation, and collaboration can make everything better for both your team and users
20 Oct
How teams implement quality engineering through collaboration, continuous testing and modern practices
14 Feb
Governance
The policies, processes, and guardrails put in place to ensure that code, experiments, and tools produced across a team meet standards of safety, consistency, and reliability, especially as AI lowers the barrier to building.
The question is no longer about engineering capacity, but Governance. The teams that win will be those that create the safest “Playgrounds”. The teams that win won’t write the most code — they’ll create the safest environments for everyone to build in.
Ephemeral Code
Short-lived, AI-generated code designed to be deleted after use, typically for running experiments such as A/B tests on a component or call-to-action, with Engineering providing guardrails through a component library and code review.
Disposable Code
AI-generated code used for internal validation and testing core logic during the "can we even do this?" phase. It lives in a sandbox and never reaches production; if it works, the learnings are handed to Engineering to be rebuilt properly.
Shift-everywhere testing
Shift everywhere encompasses and guides both shift left and shift right actions. This core approach promotes the integration of quality throughout the entire SDLC, rather than confining it to specific phases. It embodies a holistic view of quality, recognising that every step, from ideation through to ongoing maintenance and monitoring, is an opportunity to build quality in and reduce risks. This continuous integration of quality practices makes Continuous Quality an achievable ambition of Quality Engineering. QE professionals champion this approach to ensure quality is continuously considered and engineered.
Shift-left testing
The concept of shifting left means integrating quality practices earlier in the development cycle. Instead of waiting until development is “complete” to catch defects, we start testing, validating, and optimising right from the start, even before the first line of code is written. This shift helps identify issues before they escalate, reducing rework and improving overall development speed.
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Head of Engineering Lesson 1 - Communicating with the Exec team
This resonates so much with me currently, both in the work I am doing and something I am writing. In leadership there is a need to be able to "tell stories" to help others understand, but also those stories have to be tailored to the audience, and the exec definitely tend to want and need to TL;DR version!
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3.2.0 of MoT Software Quality Engineering Certificate
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3.2.0 of MoT Software Quality Engineering Certificate
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6.3.0 of MoT Software Quality Engineering Certificate
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15 days ago
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