Blog

Thoughts on test automation, quality engineering, and lessons learned from two decades in QA.

Zero Axe Violations, Four Real Bugs: What AI Catches That Automated Accessibility Testing Misses

Rule-based accessibility scanners check that markup is well-formed, not that it's true. I built a demo site engineered to pass axe-core with zero violations on every page, then built a second Playwright suite that uses Claude to judge alt-text accuracy, DOM-vs-visual reading order, real focus behaviour, and error-message clarity - and it failed on every seeded defect, including one in the demo's own 'control' case I hadn't noticed myself.

3 Sept 2026 13 min read

Oracle PL/SQL SQL Server

OIA: Building a Standalone Oracle Impact-Analysis Tool, Then Debugging It Against CorporateRAG's Own Fixture

CorporateRAG already traces SQL Server impact-analysis questions through a deliberately tricky fixture database. I built OIA — a standalone CLI tool doing the same job for Oracle, from scratch — then ported that exact fixture to PL/SQL and used CorporateRAG's own already-fixed tools as ground truth to compare against. The discrepancies caught four real bugs: a lineage parser reading the wrong AST node (twice), invisible WHERE-clause eligibility rules, a missing 'read the real source' tool, and a self-referencing Mermaid diagram.

1 Aug 2026 15 min read

RAG PostgreSQL pgvector

CorporateRAG: Designing a Database to Break My Own RAG System (On Purpose)

I asked Claude to write the prompt for a realistic SQL Server reporting database, engineered with deliberate blind spots, then used it to catch CorporateRAG giving a plausible-but-wrong answer to an impact-analysis question — and had Claude diagnose the root cause, plan three rounds of fixes, implement them, and verify each one against the live system rather than just the diff.

22 Jul 2026 13 min read

RAG PostgreSQL pgvector

CorporateRAG Revisited: Query Rewriting, Reranking, and Knowing When to Say 'I Don't Know'

Six upgrades to CorporateRAG since the original post — query rewriting, cross-encoder reranking, multi-modal image captioning, a lightweight entity graph, a semantic response cache, and a confidence gate that declines to answer rather than guess — plus a full walkthrough of the request/response pipeline that ties them together.

21 Jul 2026 15 min read

Jira Python Graphviz

Mapping Jira Epic Dependencies: A Link Matrix, a Crossing-Free Graph and a Build Order

Building a Python script that turns a Jira Epic's child tasks into a dependency matrix, a network diagram and a priority-aware build order - and why I replaced Mermaid's bundled layout engine with Graphviz along the way.

19 Jun 2026 10 min read

Selenium WebDriver Ruby Cucumber

Porting Demo Mode to Selenium: Chapter Cards, Highlights, and Building Video Recording From Scratch

How I rebuilt a Playwright BDD demo mode - DOM overlay title cards, red/teal element highlights, and Examples-table field values - on top of Ruby, Cucumber and Selenium WebDriver, and had to build video recording myself with ffmpeg since Selenium has no equivalent of Playwright's built-in recorder.

18 Jun 2026 14 min read

Playwright BDD playwright-bdd

From Test Suite to Demo Video: Building a Demo Mode for Playwright BDD

How I added an opt-in demo mode to a Playwright BDD suite - DOM overlay title cards, red and teal element highlights, and named field-value pairs from the Gherkin Examples table read at runtime from the feature file.

16 Jun 2026 13 min read

Playwright MCP Claude Code

The mcpplaywright-test Reference: What Every Tool Does and Where You'd Use It

A complete guide to all 82 tools exposed by the Playwright MCP server — grouped by function, with descriptions and concrete use cases. The planner, generator, and healer agents use fewer than 30 of them.

30 May 2026 20 min read

Selenium WebDriver Playwright Ruby

Porting Playwright's AI Test Agents to Selenium WebDriver: Ruby, Cucumber, and the Locator Translation Problem

How I adapted the Playwright planner–generator–healer agent pipeline to produce Ruby + Cucumber + Capybara output instead of TypeScript — what stays the same, what changes, and where the locator translation table becomes critical.

29 May 2026 15 min read

Playwright Selenium Performance

Selenium vs Playwright: What Seven Real Tests on an Oracle APEX App Actually Show

I ran the same seven end-to-end tests against a live Oracle APEX e-commerce application in both Selenium Ruby and Playwright TypeScript, with Playwright at 1, 2, 3, and 4 workers. The results confirm some well-known theories, contradict others, and reveal exactly when parallelism stops helping and starts hurting.

24 May 2026 13 min read

GitHub Actions Playwright CI/CD

Self-Diagnosing CI: Auto-Creating Jira Tickets and Running a Playwright Healer Agent in GitHub Actions

How I wired up automatic Jira ticket creation and a Claude Code healer agent into a GitHub Actions Playwright workflow — and what five rounds of fixing taught me about the gap between 'passes tests' and 'good code'.

22 May 2026 14 min read

MCP Model Context Protocol FastAPI

Connecting Claude to a SQL Server Database with FastAPI and the Model Context Protocol

A walkthrough of a two-layer demo project that exposes a SQL Server database to Claude via a FastAPI REST API and an MCP stdio server — covering what each file does, where the API ends and the MCP begins, and what a production-ready version of this stack would look like.

19 May 2026 14 min read

AI Agents CrewAI LiteLLM

Building a Multi-Agent Company Research Tool for Job Interview Preparation

How I built a six-agent CrewAI pipeline that researches any company from a URL and produces a 9-section interview preparation report — covering business model, tech stack, competitors, culture, and a tailored interview guide with specific questions to ask.

18 May 2026 15 min read

Playwright AI Test Automation

Building a Production-Grade Playwright Suite for Oracle APEX with PCOM and AI Agents

How I used Playwright's AI planner, generator and healer agents - driven by Claude Code - to build a maintainable end-to-end test suite for a real Oracle APEX e-commerce app, structured around a Page Component Object Model that makes self-healing actually work.

13 May 2026 14 min read

Jira Atlassian Forge Dashboard

Building a Custom Jira Dashboard Spacer Gadget with Forge

How a tiny custom Forge gadget fixed the alignment problem on a two-column Jira wallboard - and what I learned about building Jira Cloud apps along the way.

5 May 2026 8 min read

RAG Jira Confluence

CorporateRAG: Ask Natural-Language Questions Across Jira, Confluence, SQL Server and GitHub

How I built a multi-source RAG system that indexes Jira, Confluence, SQL Server and GitHub into a single vector index and answers natural-language questions with grounded, cited answers.

24 Apr 2026 14 min read

RAG Confluence LangChain

Building a Confluence RAG: Ask Natural-Language Questions of Your Wiki with LangChain, ChromaDB and Claude

How I built a lightweight Retrieval-Augmented Generation system that indexes a Confluence space, embeds the content locally, and answers natural-language questions with grounded citations back to the source pages.

21 Apr 2026 8 min read

k6 Load Testing Performance Testing

Full-Stack Load Testing on Windows 11: Building a k6 + Docker + Prometheus + Grafana Observability Pipeline

How I built a complete observability stack using k6, Docker Compose, Prometheus, InfluxDB, Grafana and windows_exporter — running across two Windows 11 machines — to get real-time performance dashboards during load tests, and the challenges involved in making it all work.

11 Apr 2026 14 min read

k6 Load Testing Performance Testing

Lightweight Load Testing on Windows 11: Building a Complete k6 + Flask + Plotly Pipeline Without the DevOps Overhead

How I built an end-to-end load testing solution using k6, Flask, psutil, pandas and Plotly — no Docker, Prometheus or Grafana required — that runs natively on two Windows 11 machines and generates a self-contained interactive dashboard.

11 Apr 2026 12 min read

LLM Ollama LM Studio

Alternatives to Running LLMs Locally: Ollama Cloud, LM Studio on a Spare Machine and More

A practical guide to running powerful LLMs without melting your daily driver — covering Ollama Cloud, LM Studio remote sharing via LM Link, and other strong alternatives for use with Roo Code and similar AI coding agents.

9 Apr 2026 8 min read

SQL Database Testing Data Verification

Using SQL MERGE to Detect Inserts, Updates and Deletes Between Two Tables

A single-pass SQL pattern using MERGE with OUTPUT to compare two tables and classify every difference as an insert, update or delete - with AI generating the query directly from the database schema.

8 Apr 2026 6 min read

Playwright AI Test Automation

Playwright AI Agents: How I Used Grok to Explore and Demystify Test Automation's Newest Feature

A hands-on walkthrough of Playwright's AI-powered Test Agents — planner, generator and healer — and how using Grok to craft the right prompt made exploring this new technology effortless.

7 Apr 2026 10 min read

Playwright SQL Server Database Testing

Connecting Playwright Tests to SQL Server: End-to-End Database Verification

How I built a Playwright test project that connects directly to SQL Server using mssql and msnodesqlv8, enabling true end-to-end testing where UI actions are verified against the database - plus a look at alternative approaches.

6 Apr 2026 9 min read