Real stories from 30+ years in the trenches. No vendor hype. Just what works.
I've been in IT for over 30 years—started as a computer repair technician in 1996, became a teacher, taught myself programming, eventually landed in quality engineering, and now I'm building the bridge between classical QE and what I call Agentic QE.
The Quality Forge isn't just a website. It's where I document what actually works when you try to evolve quality practices from testing-as-activity to agents-as-orchestrators. No sugar-coating. No vendor pitches. Just real implementation stories from production environments.
I practice what I call the Holistic Testing Model—quality across all dimensions, not just the happy path. That means:
I blend TDD (both London and Chicago schools), XP practices (especially pair/ensemble programming), and Rapid Software Testing. These aren't old practices—they're foundations that evolve when you add agentic principles on top.
Agentic QE isn't about replacing testers with AI. It's about evolving how we orchestrate quality through PACTS principles:
Test before bugs. Anticipate risks and design testability into the architecture, so agents forecast failures rather than just react to them.
Teams and agents own quality and decide within boundaries (guardrails). Self-executing test flows that always explain their reasoning.
Whole-team quality. Humans and agents work together. Testing becomes orchestration, not gatekeeping.
Risk-focused testing. Test what matters, skip what doesn't—apply effort where bugs hide and hurt, not everywhere equally.
Governance, observability, and explainability of agent behavior—inspired by DORA's research on AI-assisted delivery and platform-engineering quality measurement. Especially important in regulated industries. We measure confidence, not trust: trust is a human feeling, while confidence can be mathematically explained. Ships with a playbook and a readiness-assessment guide. The anti-pattern: bolting agentic AI onto chaos.
PACT—Proactive, Autonomous, Collaborative, Targeted—gave us a way to classify and build agentic quality systems. But running agents in production, especially in regulated contexts, surfaced a gap: without governance, observability, and explainability, autonomous agents can't earn a place in the enterprise. DORA's research confirmed it—AI without structure can have a negative impact, and the #1 failure mode is bolting agentic AI onto chaos.
So the framework evolves: a fifth principle, Structured. PACT becomes PACTS. We deliberately say confidence, not trust—trust is a human feeling, while confidence can be measured and explained. PACTS ships with a playbook and a readiness-assessment guide.
PACT originated with Reuven Cohen (Agentics) and was adapted to QE by Dragan Spiridonov. PACTS adds Structured.
In October 2025, I founded Quantum Quality Engineering and started building the Serbian Agentic Foundation—the first community of its kind in the Balkans. We meet monthly at StartIt centers across Serbia, learning together about quality in the AI age.
I'm also a member of the global Agentics Foundation, bringing PACTS principles and frameworks to the quality engineering space.
The Forge is where I share:
Because quality isn't found—it's forged. Through heat, pressure, deliberate crafting. Through tests that fail and teach. Through agents that learn and improve. Through communities that share and grow together. Quality is forged in the fire of production, shaped by real constraints, tempered by honest feedback.
Questions? Want to collaborate? Looking for a speaker on Agentic QE?
Based in Novi Sad, Serbia 🇷🇸
Working with teams globally 🌍