#quality-assurance
5 articles
- Religiosity vs. GDP: A Regression That Passed Every Check — and a Causal Story It Can't Tell
A statistics assignment asked me to regress national GDP on a religiosity score. The model passed cleanly: a significant negative slope, ~38% of variance explained, both residual diagnostics clean. That cleanliness is exactly why it's dangerous — a passing model and a causal story are not the same thing.
- The QA Manager, Part IV: Rating the Raters — and Who Never Got a Vote
Closing out a four-part series on one role: designing the performance appraisal that would evaluate whoever gets hired into it taught me that a rating system is a value statement before it's a measurement tool — and mine confessed what I quietly reward, and whose voice I'd left out entirely.
- The QA Manager, Part III: The Satisfaction Survey I Built — and Every Way It Could Mislead Me
An I/O-psychology assignment asked me to build an employee satisfaction survey. I built six questions to measure whether someone in my own role would be happy — then read my own instrument the way I read a build I'm about to sign off.
- Catching False Passes in a QA Selection Plan
An I/O-psychology assignment asked me to design a selection process from predictors up. I built a three-stage funnel with validity coefficients and cutoff scores — then found the statistical error and the bias I'd built in.
- Shipping Defects in a QA Manager Job Description
Writing a job description in my very first I/O-psychology course taught me that a JD and a software requirement fail for the same reason — my own spec shipped with defects I'd have flagged in anyone else's, and the posting that hired me couldn't pass the same audit either.