As QA professionals, we're experts at identifying system failures, analyzing root causes, and implementing sustainable fixes—at work. But when Alison McGuigan's personal life became a critical severity issue (layoff, miscarriage, postpartum fog, and a chaotic household), she realized she'd never applied that same rigor to her own circumstances. She treated her messy house like a failed deployment. So she ran an 8-week experiment: What if she debugged her life like a QA project? She conducted root cause analysis to find real problems beyond surface symptoms. She defined "minimum viable...
Alison McGuigan
Director of Enterprise Quality Assurance
Golden 1 Credit Union
Alison McGuigan is a QA Director with over a decade of experience leading quality strategy in software development. During postpartum fog, she decided to apply her professional frameworks to her personal chaos. The experiment worked better than any productivity advice ever had, leading her to launch Testing in Production, a newsletter exploring the intersection of quality engineering and everyday life through bug reports around parenting, essays on technical concepts applied to living, and frameworks for treating life's problems like debuggable systems. She's a mother of two, a recovering perfectionist, and a believer that if we're testing in production anyway, we might as well have a methodology.