The Quality Craft

Journey into Software Quality Excellence

Author: Phuong.Chu

  • The Soft Skill Behind Strict Work

    The Soft Skill Behind Strict Work

    I walked into testing believing it would make me sharper, stricter, harder to please. Years later, I realized the craft had done the opposite—it made me softer, and my life got better for it.

  • Blaming the Org, Blaming the Child

    Blaming the Org, Blaming the Child

    At work I blame the company for nothing getting owned. At home I blame my son for the same thing. Two complaints, the exact same shape — and both of them let me off the hook.

  • Love at First Prompt

    Love at First Prompt

    It was December 27, 2024 — the first time I ever used ChatGPT. At that time, I was going through a rather dark period. My mood was low, and many things in life weren’t going the way I had hoped. Then, unexpectedly, something shifted. In the middle of those ordinary chat interactions with ChatGPT, I…

  • Feel the Beat

    Feel the Beat

    In my earlier post, “Choosing Focus in the Age of Overload,” I talked about cutting the noise and focusing on ourselves. After practicing that idea for a while, I discovered something even more meaningful: I slowly began to feel the beat of life. In a world that is constantly noisy—flooded with information and endless consumption—our…

  • The Subtle Tension Between Management and Leadership

    The Subtle Tension Between Management and Leadership

    Execution Without Direction Here’s something I didn’t understand for a long time:I was strong at execution, but weak at direction. For years, I didn’t recognize this as an imbalance. I was doing management well—without noticing the absence of leadership. Growing Up Inside Structure Looking back, I can see why I felt lost at certain points…

  • Why Separate Manual and Automation Teams Quietly Hurt Your Product Quality

    Why Separate Manual and Automation Teams Quietly Hurt Your Product Quality

    In many software companies, the QA structure looks something like this: On paper, this sounds efficient: “Let the manual testers think about test coverage, and let the automation engineers handle the tooling and coding.” In practice, this model often creates invisible gaps that directly hurt product quality. I’ve worked inside this structure, and I’ve grown…

  • Choosing Focus in the Age of Overload

    Choosing Focus in the Age of Overload

    In today’s hyper-connected world, I once found myself drowning in information. News from everywhere — online articles, Facebook, endless short videos, reels, TikTok, even group chats on Zalo — kept pouring in nonstop. Most of that information added no real value to my life. Worse, it drained my time, affected my mood, and sometimes even…

  • How to Start Learning Automation as a Manual Tester

    How to Start Learning Automation as a Manual Tester

    In today’s software industry, the pressure to deliver features faster—without compromising quality—is higher than ever. As teams transition toward Agile and DevOps models, automation testing has become essential. Companies are investing heavily in automated testing pipelines, while the scope of manual testing is shrinking and is increasingly reserved for areas that automation cannot yet cover.…

  • Rethinking Work–Life Balance

    Rethinking Work–Life Balance

    For many years, my definition of work–life balance was simple and mechanical:eight hours of work, eight hours for family, eight hours of sleep. A perfect, evenly divided schedule. I believed that if I followed this formula, happiness and peace would naturally follow. But reality proved otherwise. Even when I strictly separated work from home, I…

  • Directional Learning Through Improvement Mindset

    Directional Learning Through Improvement Mindset

    In today’s tech world, one of the biggest frustrations isn’t a lack of resources—it’s the opposite. There’s too much to learn, too much to absorb: frameworks updating overnight, tools reinventing themselves, subfields branching endlessly. With tutorials, courses, and documentation everywhere, many people feel overwhelmed before they even begin. I’ve been there—collecting bookmarks, saving videos, skimming…