The carton was fine yesterday. It'll probably be fine today. And still, you crack the lid and take a sniff before it goes anywhere near your coffee. That half-second of doubt is pure QA. "It worked yesterday" is the most expensive sentence in software, because code rots quietly: a dependency shifts, a config changes, something three systems away moves, and your perfectly good feature curdles. Smelling the milk is regression testing — re-checking the thing that already worked, precisely because you can't tell from the outside whether it still does.

Nobody touched the login flow this sprint, so it's tempting to skip it. But a library three layers down got bumped, and "nobody touched it" is exactly the assumption that bites. So you sniff: one quick pass through sign-in before release, every time, even when logic says it's fine. Most days it smells fine and takes a minute. The one day it doesn't is the entire reason you kept checking.

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Until next time,
Tina
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