Quality Resolutions: 10 Small Habits That Make You a Better Tester in 2026
“Be a better tester” is not a resolution. It’s a slogan.
The problem with most New Year resolutions is that they are either too vague (“learn automation”) or too heroic (“read one testing book per month while triaging three incident channels and running six regressions a week”).
This list is deliberately modest. Ten small habits. No new tools required. You can implement most of them in the gaps between stand-up, CAB, and the inevitable “quick question” pings.
None of these will make you Insta-famous. All of them will quietly raise the epistemic quality of your work.
1. Upgrade Your Bug Reports from “What Broke” to “What This Tells Us”
Most bug reports stop at “what happened vs what I expected”. That’s table stakes.
A habit for 2026: add one more layer every time:
What does this defect suggest about our system, our tests**, or our assumptions?
For each non-trivial bug, add a two-line micro-analysis:
⏵ Hypothesis: “This suggests we never tested X combination of state + role.”
⏵ Implication: “Similar issues may exist in [these related flows].”
This moves your bug report from diagnostic (“this screen is broken”) to investigative (“this class of risks might be underexplored”).
You are not writing a thesis. You are leaving breadcrumbs for future you (and for future incident reviews) that say: “This isn’t just a one-off, there might be a pattern here.”
Resolution: For every significant bug, add a brief “What this tells us” note.
2. Add a “Risk Note” to Tickets You Touch
We talk about risk a lot. We very rarely write it down where decisions actually live: in tickets.
New habit:
Every time you test a story or change request, add a one-sentence risk note before it moves to “Done”:
⏵ “Biggest remaining risk: behaviour under degraded network; not covered in this cycle.”
⏵ “Risk shifted from UI to data quality – depends heavily on upstream enrichment.”
⏵ “We are relying on feature flag kill-switch; rollback is not trivial.”
This is not you saying “I refuse to sign off”. It is you saying:
Given our time, information, and constraints, this is what I’m most worried about.
Benefits:
⏵ Developers see where your mental red flags are.
⏵ Product sees that “Done” is not synonymous with “Safe in all universes”.
⏵ Incident reviews can look back at risk notes and ask: “Did we accept this consciously, or just not see it?”
Resolution: Before moving any ticket to “Done”, write one sentence: Biggest remaining risk: …"
3. Treat One Session per Week as a Deliberate Experiment
Most testing is performed as if the system were static and the tester were neutral. Neither is true.
Pick one testing session per week and make it an explicit experiment:
⏵ Choose a question:
⏵ _“What happens if I deliberately violate every input constraint?”_
⏵ _“What if I use this feature like an adversarial power user?”_
⏵ _“What if I simulate a lazy integration partner?”_
⏵ Set a timebox (30–45 minutes).
⏵ Capture three findings:
⏵ _What surprised me?_
⏵ _What broke?_
⏵ _What design assumptions did I uncover?_
The point is not to find “more bugs”. It is to train your testing as a hypothesis-driven activity rather than “click around until time runs out”.
Over time, these micro-experiments sharpen your model of the system and your ability to detect weirdness quickly.
Resolution: One timeboxed “experiment session” per week, with a written question and three takeaways.
4. Keep Lightweight Exploratory Notes (for Your Future Self, Not for Auditors)
The word “documentation” tends to summon memories of 47-page test plans and compliance rituals. Ignore that. Think field notes, not ISO audit.
New habit:
During exploratory testing, keep a running log in whatever tool you like:
⏵ timestamped bullets:
⏵ _[10:12] Trying password reset with expired token_
⏵ _[10:18] Observed odd latency spike when switching accounts_
⏵ _[10:25] Hypothesis: caching boundary between service A and B_
At the end, add a two-line summary:
⏵ “Most interesting risk: race condition around concurrent updates.”
⏵ “Next time: explore [adjacent area] with [different data set].”
No one may ever read these notes. That’s fine. You will. And when a production incident appears in a vaguely familiar area six weeks later, you will have artifacts of your prior thinking instead of “I swear I saw something like this once”.
Resolution: Keep simple exploratory notes for complex sessions; end each with a two-line summary.
5. Pair with a Developer Once per Sprint (Even for 30 Minutes)
We all say “quality is everyone’s responsibility” and then sit in separate meetings.
Make it boringly concrete:
⏵ Once per sprint, book 30 minutes with a developer:
⏵ to walk through a change before you test it,
⏵ or to explore a tricky behaviour together,
⏵ or to review an incident and look at the logs side-by-side.
You don’t need to turn this into a huge ceremony. Think of it as cross-pollination:
⏵ You see how they reason about the system.
⏵ They see how you reason about risk and edge cases.
You are not trying to become a developer. You are short-circuiting miscommunication. Many “test vs dev” tensions vanish when you look at the same request logs and realise you are both fighting the same failure modes.
Resolution: One deliberate dev-pairing session per sprint. No excuses, even if it’s just 30 minutes.
6. Rewrite at Least One Test Case per Week as a Narrative
Test cases age badly because they tend to be written as mechanical scripts:
Click X, enter Y, expect Z.
A small but effective habit: once per week, take one important test case and rewrite it as a short narrative:
⏵ “A returning customer logs in from a slow mobile connection, tries to change their subscription tier while a promotion is active, and then cancels mid-flow.”
Then derive your steps from that story.
Why this matters:
⏵ Narratives force you to reconnect test steps to real user behaviour.
⏵ You catch missing states (network flakiness, partial saves, conflicting promotions) more easily.
⏵ When you show this to product or UX, they can actually reason about whether the behaviour makes sense.
You are not turning your entire test repository into a novel. You are keeping one living thread that traces back to user reality.
Resolution: Each week, pick one key scenario and rewrite it as a user story before you test it.
7. Ask for One Concrete Example in Every Ambiguous Conversation
Ambiguity in requirements is not a moral failing. It is a property of language. The hack is simple:
Whenever you hear a phrase like “it should be fast”, “it should be intuitive”, or “it should behave like last time”, ask:
Can you give me one concrete example of what ‘good’ looks like here?
And then, crucially, write that example down in the ticket, spec, or your notes.
You are doing lightweight requirements sampling:
⏵ You force stakeholders to step out of the abstract.
⏵ You reduce the risk of “this is not what I meant” later.
⏵ You accumulate a small library of examples that can be reused as acceptance tests or regression seeds.
This is not a grand workshop. It is one tiny question repeated consistently.
Resolution: In any vague discussion, ask for one concrete example and capture it in writing.
8. Build a Tiny “Quality Portfolio” as You Go
Most testers wildly under-document their own impact. At performance review time, everything blurs into “I tested stuff and helped ship releases.”
New habit: maintain a living “quality portfolio” in a simple document:
Each week, add one bullet under one of these headings:
⏵ Bugs that mattered:
⏵ _“Found incident-class issue before go-live: [one line of context].”_
⏵ Risks surfaced early:
⏵ _“Flagged authentication dependency; led to design change.”_
⏵ Process improvements:
⏵ _“Introduced risk notes in tickets; now used by two squads.”_
⏵ Collaboration wins:
⏵ _“Joint session with dev team reduced handover friction on feature X.”_
By the end of the year, you have:
⏵ instant material for performance reviews,
⏵ concrete examples for CV / LinkedIn,
⏵ and a much clearer understanding of where your real leverage lies.
Resolution: Maintain a simple “quality portfolio” doc and add one bullet per week.
9. Schedule “Learning in the Gaps”, Not “Big Bang Upskilling”
“I’ll learn automation / performance / security next quarter” is how years disappear.
Instead of heroic goals, use micro-allocations:
⏵ Pick one topic you care about for this quarter:
⏵ e.g. API testing depth, observability, testability in microservices, performance basics.
⏵ Dedicate 30 minutes per week to that theme:
⏵ watch part of a talk,
⏵ read one article and summarise it in your own words,
⏵ prototype one tiny thing in a sandbox environment.
The constraint is important: one theme, small chunks.
This aligns better with reality than pretending you will do a three-day course while juggling releases. You’re building a compound-interest effect on skills instead of binge-cramming and forgetting.
Resolution: Choose one skill theme per quarter and give it 30 minutes each week, no heroics.
10. Practice Saying “Not Yet” Instead of “Yes” or “No”
One of the hardest skills in testing and release management is tempered opposition:
⏵ Striking the balance between “this is unsafe, don’t ship” and “sure, whatever, YOLO to production”.
For 2026, practice an intermediate response:
Not yet – here is what would need to be true for this to feel safe enough.
For example:
⏵ “Not yet. I’d be comfortable once we have: one performance run at realistic load, and a validated rollback path.”
⏵ “Not yet. If we cannot test cross-region failover now, let’s at least make sure we have feature flags and monitoring to catch it early.”
You are doing two things simultaneously:
Refusing to rubber-stamp unsafe decisions.
Offering a pathway to “yes” that is anchored in concrete conditions.
This makes you a partner in decision-making, not a gatekeeping obstacle or a passive tester.
Resolution: When pressured, default to “not yet, if we do X/Y/Z, then yes” instead of a blunt yes/no.
Closing: Resolutions as Micro-Refactors of Your Practice
New Year’s resolutions for testers do not need to be dramatic. You don’t need a new title, a new tool stack, or a new job to operate at a higher level.
What you need is small, repeatable interventions in how you:
⏵ describe bugs,
⏵ talk about risk,
⏵ take notes,
⏵ interact with developers,
⏵ and represent your work to the organisation.
These ten habits are all locally cheap and globally compounding. Adopt even three of them consistently in 2026, and your practice will feel very different by the time next December’s code freeze rolls around.
You will still have chaos. You will still have last-minute “quick changes”. But you will also have sharper language, better artefacts, and a much stronger sense that you are not just running tests — you are curating the organisation’s understanding of its own systems.
Disclaimer: The perspectives expressed herein are personal interpretations intended to foster professional dialogue; they do not represent any official stance of current or former employers.