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"Nobody wants to read the documentation, although it is important." - Lisa Crispin
In this episode, I talk to Lisa Crispin about holistic testing and what it really means for teams striving for better software quality. Lisa brings her experience to the conversation, sharing how testing is much more than a stage or a checklist - it’s a mindset that weaves through every part of the development process. We dig into the practical side: how teams can focus on both internal and external quality, the value of strong relationships, and the power of good questions. It’s clear: true quality comes from collaboration and curiosity, not just tools or process. There’s a lot for teams to rethink here.
Lisa Crispin is a consultant, author and speaker based in Vermont, USA. She and Janet Gregory have co-authored four books, most recently Holistic Testing: Weave Quality Into Your Product. They have also developed two courses taught by training providers around the world.
Highlights:
- Lack of shared understanding is the primary driver of rework: teams build and test a feature, only for the product owner to reject it because the requirement was never fully explored.
- Testing activities belong at every stage of the development cycle, from evaluating business ideas in discovery through observing customer behavior in production, not only in a dedicated test phase.
- Risk assessment during planning prevents defects before a single line of code is written, yet many teams skip it even when they practice test-driven development and continuous integration.
- Testers who build relationships with operations engineers, site reliability engineers, and designers gain visibility into production risks that never surface inside the delivery team alone.
- A visual, collaboratively built test strategy on a mind map outperforms a written document because teammates engage with it, update it, and generate ideas they would not reach through reading alone.
