Welcome to Modern Testing

Welcome to the new home of Modern Testing. The AB Testing Podcast is now hosted at Anchor FM, but Brent and I (and probably some of the three) will add content here from time to time.

Discuss the Podcast

Join our slack group to talk to us (and other listeners) about the podcast, modern testing, or whatever else is on your mind. (note – this link now expires every 30 days. If it doesn’t work, that means I forgot to update it, and you can email me at update-the-damn-link at angryweasel.com)

The Modern Testing Mission Statement

Accelerate the Achievement of Shippable Quality

The Modern Testing Principles

These continue to be a work in progress – feel free to add comments, or join our slack group for a more detailed discussion.

We’ve said many times that the principles aren’t that modern, and aren’t about testing. These evolved during our discussions on how we were seeing (and still see) people who were testers in the early days of Agile and rapid releases provide value to their teams in new ways. In many ways, these are delivery principles, but we’re not going to change the name.

That said, we’ve been floating the idea of rephrasing these slightly to focus on whole team delivery. That updated list looks like this.

MT Principles 2.0

  1. Our priority is improving the business.
  2. We use models like Lean Thinking and the Theory of Constraints to help identify, prioritize and mitigate bottlenecks from the system.
  3. We are a force for continuous improvement, and adapt and optimize our practices in order to succeed, rather than using safety nets to catch our failures.
  4. We care deeply about the quality culture of our team, and we coach, lead, and nurture each other team towards a more mature quality culture.
  5. We believe that the customer is the only one capable to judge and evaluate the quality of our product
  6. We use data extensively to deeply understand customer usage and then close the gaps between product hypotheses and business impact.
  7. We expand abilities and knowhow across the team; understanding that this may reduce (or eliminate) the need for dedicated specialists.

The seven original principles of Modern Testing are:

  1. Our priority is improving the business.
  2. We accelerate the team, and use models like Lean Thinking and the Theory of Constraints to help identify, prioritize and mitigate bottlenecks from the system.
  3. We are a force for continuous improvement, helping the team adapt and optimize in order to succeed, rather than providing a safety net to catch failures.
  4. We care deeply about the quality culture of our team, and we coach, lead, and nurture the team towards a more mature quality culture.
  5. We believe that the customer is the only one capable to judge and evaluate the quality of our product.
  6. We use data extensively to deeply understand customer usage and then close the gaps between product hypotheses and business impact.
  7. We expand testing abilities and knowhow across the team; understanding that this may reduce (or eliminate) the need for a dedicated testing specialist.


Modern Testing Principles by AB Testing is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.