Senior QA: Depth Everywhere Is Depth Nowhere

TL;DR A senior QA engineer who tests everything equally spreads the time so thin that a risky rework gets the same attention as a copy change, and the bugs escape where the risk was. Score each area by impact × likelihood, test the top deepest, write down what you will not test, and make every escape leave a test behind.

Do this: Before your next release, list its areas, score impact and likelihood from 1 to 5, and send your PM three sentences on what gets only a smoke pass.

Part 3 left you owning FieldFlow's smoke suite with R25 on the way: the sync rework, bulk invoicing, the planner facelift, 30 small fixes and the rounding option, 6 tester-days before code freeze, and 11 escapes last quarter, 3 of them in invoice totals. Where should the depth go?

Six days across five items is a little over a day each: fair, and the sync rework gets the same day as the planner's new paint. The repo calls this perfectionism. Depth everywhere means depth nowhere.

QA Career Path, in seven parts:

1. The QA Career Path: Map Yourself by Scope, Not by Title
2. New QA Engineer? Test the Risk, Not the Ticket
3. Manual to Automation Testing in Six Months: Skip the Tutorial Loop
4. Senior QA: Depth Everywhere Is Depth Nowhere (you are here)
5. After Senior QA: Lead the Release or Own the Platform?
6. QA Manager to Head of QA: The Escape Bill That Wins Budget
7. Will AI Replace Testers? Make Your Judgment the Evidence

Score risk, then spend the days

Exhaustive testing is impossible, so a senior QA engineer decides depth by risk: likelihood × impact, each scored 1 to 5.

1. List the areas in the release.
2. Score impact: what happens if this fails? Money movement, data loss and legal exposure score high.
3. Score likelihood: new code, complex logic, historically buggy areas and many integrations score high.
4. Multiply. Test the top deepest. The bottom may get only a smoke pass, and the plan says so.

This is the repo's own FieldFlow-shaped table:

For R25 the repo's exercise lands the same way: sync rework and bulk invoicing on top with deep coverage, and someone told in writing what's thin. FieldFlow and its numbers are fictional.

Say what you won't test, in writing

The risk table is also your communication tool: when someone asks "why wasn't X tested more?", it shows the decision was deliberate and shared.

R25: the sync rework and bulk invoicing get full coverage plus exploratory sessions.
The planner facelift gets targeted regression, and the 30 small fixes a smoke pass only.
If you want more depth on the planner, tell me which of the top two it comes from.

Every escape leaves a test behind

Bugs will leak. A Senior makes sure the same one can't leak twice, with three blameless questions:

Take an escape titled "Invoice total ignores 2nd discount line when VAT-exempt" (the repo's example). Introduced in the requirement, design, code, config or data? Should review, a unit test, test design or regression have caught it? Which one change would have? That change lands as a test.

Monthly, look for patterns: requirement gaps point at refinement, regression gaps at automation priorities, one module clustering at targeted exploratory testing. With 3 of FieldFlow's 11 escapes in invoice totals, invoicing is the cluster.

Seniors multiply, or stall

From the Senior checklist, you are ready for the next step when:

• your risk calls, including what not to test, have been right more often than wrong;
• juniors visibly improve because of your reviews and pairing;
• you estimate a feature's testing with the assumptions stated;
• you coordinate testing when the lead is away, and nothing falls over.

Seniors stall as the hero tester, whose area nobody else can cover, or by rewriting juniors' work instead of teaching.

Try it

Here are the areas in my next release, with what changed in each: <list>.
Help me score impact and likelihood from 1 to 5 for each, asking me
questions where you lack facts (money, data loss, new code, integrations).
Then draft three sentences to my PM saying what gets only a smoke pass.

Your risk calls hold, and when the lead is away you run R25's testing without anything falling over. The Senior checklist then asks: does that coordination work appeal to you, or the hard technical problems? At FieldFlow one is waiting: six squads share one staging database that every test mutates, and nobody trusts a red build. Part 5, After Senior QA: Lead the Release or Own the Platform?, is that choice.

Read this with your AI

Read the post "Senior QA: Depth Everywhere Is Depth Nowhere".
1. Summarise it in 5 bullets for a senior tester.
2. Ask me 3 questions to check I understood; wait, then correct me.
3. Take my last production escape and walk me through the three RCA questions.