Autism and the Future of Testing
summary
Argues that hiring autistic people only for repetitive manual regression testing is short‑sighted because DevOps and Continuous Delivery (you cannot manually regression test when you deploy ten times a day) will automate that work away. Emphasizes strengths like accurate feedback and pattern detection applied to service quality across outcomes, journeys, access and continuity. Cites healthcare.gov’s October 1 meltdown and Spotify’s poorly worded privacy post (1,300+ retweets) as examples of where nobody owned QA. Notes Apple’s move to mix testers into dev teams improved quality overnight.
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chapters (22)
- 0:00Autism and the Future of Testing
- 1:16My name is Jeff and I'm autistic
- 3:42The world tends to view artistic people by what we lack, not what we have.
- 4:34Autistic people make good testers
- 6:14You can't manually test 10 deploys/day
- 6:52You can't manually test production once/hour
- 7:39Siloed QA creates waste & delay
- 8:14Siloed QA degrades quality
- 9:11What are autistic people really good at?
- 12:09We see the gap between actual & expected
- 13:46We see patterns and holes in patterns
- 14:46We think about what might go wrong
- 16:00Agile & DevOps run on feedback
- 16:30Service systems are emergent patterns
- 17:21Complex systems continuously fail
- 17:59Shouldn't everyone do testing?
- 18:20Testers have allegiance to users
- 20:38Users care about outcomes
- 21:33Users interact through journeys
- 22:41Users expect continuity
- 23:17Design & dev are part of ops
- 23:55Service quality crosses all four dimensions
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