This blog post has been in the back of my mind for a while – but not started because I hadn’t determined how to frame it. However, thanks to one of Johanna Rothman’s newsletters, “How Can You Manage Your Feelings to Start a New Chapter?” got me started. I kept using the word retirement, but that didn’t quite feel right. It was more of a transition from one phase of my life to another without a straight trajectory.

• You can find Johanna’s newsletter here: https://createadaptablelife.com/2025/07/how-can-you-manage-your-feelings-to-start-a-new-chapter.html

Professional tester career

I started my “tester” career with my first programming job out of university when I was 38. I owe much of my testing mindset to my first supervisor. However, I also had the good fortune of having a study partner in university who believed in testing her own code. We practiced what the professors said … “work in small chunks and test as you go.”

I was a programmer for 6 years before moving into QA management. The reason I was “promoted” was because I seemed to be the only programmer who cared about quality and processes. It was a frustrating position in the waterfall world I was in, so I quit before I burned out. Luckily extreme programming and agile were just being introduced, so I was able to bring my testing and quality management knowledge to that new area of development. I remember telling my husband that I wanted to get ahead of this agile thing because it actually makes sense to me. I worked as a tester, coach, sometimes even QA lead, learning and applying everything I could.

Helping others learn

I won’t go into detail about the next twenty-some years, but I was fortunate enough to meet Lisa Crispin and write a few books about agile testing which launched my consulting, teaching, speaking and writing career. I spent my life sharing my knowledge within the community, because I believed wholeheartedly in what I was doing. I also leveraged my experience writing two other books about quality practice assessments with Selena Delesie.

When I became too busy teaching the Agile Testing course that Lisa and I created, with the encouragement of Jose Diaz we cofounded the Agile Testing Fellowship (ATF). That enabled me to step back a bit and have other instructors from around the world to teach the courses.

Changing directions

I loved my work and was living the dream, travelling far and wide across the world, meeting new people, learning about new cultures. So, what made me think I wanted something different?

Many things contributed to my decision to slow down. The foremost was due to physical issues. My mobility had become severely challenged when I tore my adductor muscle, and it didn’t seem to be able to heal properly. I couldn’t walk far and couldn’t stand for any length of time. The second major physical factor was my voice. It had been degrading slowly and there were days when it was hard to talk.

Covid gave me a bit of a break. I helped develop our courses to be taught online which allowed me to keep working while I rested both my body and my voice. However, eventually things started to get back to normal and I realized that I needed to make a hard decision. I wasn’t enjoying things like teaching classes as much as I did before. I even started to dread the next class I had to teach.

But slowing down to me meant retirement, and I wasn’t quite ready to retire so I called it semi-retirement and started figuring out what that meant.

I asked myself questions like “Do I need the money?”, “Can I afford to retire?”, “Can I still travel if I want?”  Once I was okay with the result, I needed a spreadsheet so I could look at the data.

Analyzing the data

In 2021, I made a list of everything that I had been doing and calculated how much time I spent on each task. I found that I spent 80% of my time doing work related things, and 20% doing personal activities. I recognized that when I said yes to the work stuff, my time to spend on personal projects would be limited.

I then asked myself what I wanted retirement to look like and what was my end goal? I know myself, and knew I wouldn’t be content to reading, playing golf, etc. all day, every day. The next thing I did, was take a hard look at the list and decide what tasks I could stop and let other people do, keeping in mind what I liked to do and would want to continue.

A transition plan

I looked at different options ranging from stopping all work-related tasks, and close up shop, to putting the whole idea off for another five years or so. Eventually, I looked at a staggered approach and produced a plan for the next five years (pictured below). As you can see, I didn’t even label 2025 because it seemed so far in the future.

When I look at my plan now, it didn’t go exactly as planned, as to be expected. But as of the beginning of August 2025, I am pretty much on schedule. My last remote training class was December 2022, my last in-person workshop was in July 2023, and my last conference was Agile Testing Days in November 2023.

New directions

This is the first personal blog post I have written since June 2024. I continue to write blog posts for the Agile Testing Fellowship with Lisa Crispin, and record video chats posted on the ATF YouTube channel under the Donkeys and Dragons logo. I still follow the community and sometimes contribute, but not as often as I used to.

I am deeply committed to improving my painting abilities, so have been taking courses and involving myself in that community. And even though I don’t travel for work anymore, my husband and I continue to see the world – just at a slower pace.

Last year, I wrote another book but with my sister as co-author. It was a personal book about our family history starting with our great-grandparents and what it was like growing up. My parents died young, and I never had a chance to ask them all the questions I wanted to, so I hope my children appreciate this book when they are ready to ask those questions. Hopefully, I’m still alive to answer, but I take each day as it comes. The book ended up being 250 pages on 8” x10” sized paper.

My future projects include two more books like that one ,so I’m fairly sure I’ll be writing until I can’t anymore.

I’ll probably never fully retire, but I really like the idea of transitioning to a new chapter of my life. I’ve not stopped learning and growing, but I have changed directions. With that, I’ll leave you with a  couple of samples of my newest passion.