Quality is a discipline, not a phase.
I’m Elena Kulgavaya — a QA Tech Lead who writes about the parts of quality engineering nobody puts on a slide.
Fifteen years in QA teaches you a lot of wrong lessons. You learn to protect the release gate. You learn to write more tests. You learn to say “it needs more testing” when you’re not sure. And then at some point you realize that all of those instincts were making things slower, not safer.
QA Explained is where I work through what actually helps. No vendor pitches, no maturity-model bingo. Just what actually moves quality: where to test, when to shift left, and how to design failures that point straight at the fix.
What I believe
- — A test that doesn’t tell you where the fix is isn’t a safety net. It’s noise.
- — E2E tests are a symptom. They grow when teams don’t trust the layer below.
- — Shift left is a direction, not a practice. Moving tests earlier without changing what they test just moves the problem.
- — Contract testing is the most underused idea in distributed systems. It gives you integration confidence without integration cost.
- — Every heroic bug fix is a process failure. The bug was the symptom. The process was the cause.
- — Quality is owned by the team. QA is there to make the team better at owning it.
Speaking
- 2026 DevExperts Women in Tech · panel discussion
- 2025 DevExperts The Contract Testing Library
- 2021 Podlodka QA Crew Testing Backend from Zero
- 2019 Emerge Why Testability Matters
- 2018 DelEx Test Automation. Worst Practices
I talk about contract testing, CI/CD strategy, and the culture side of quality engineering. If you’re organizing a conference, meetup, or internal engineering event — get in touch.
One essay at a time, when it’s ready.