Issue 102

COMMENT

Welcome to the 102nd issue!

This week, I found an interesting question posted on Reddit:

Why do we need testing?

It sparked a great discussion and I really enjoyed seeing the different points of view in the comments.

Happy testing!

PS. Hope your services are staying safe from the log4j vulnerability.

NEWS

5 Challenges at Work of a Junior Tester

If you're at the beginning of your software testing career, Klaudia Dziubek has some good pieces of advice on how to navigate the common challenges you may face.

Five Tips to Improve as An Automation Engineer

Furthermore, you may be wondering how you can take your role to the next level. Enrique A Decoss has some ideas.

In relation to that, Kelly Chin shared the Lessons Learned From Manual to Automation Testing.

QA being blamed for finding issues?

This is more of a rant on Reddit but it just shows how important it is to have a healthy culture in the team. That's why it's crucial to invest in making everyone aware of the importance of testing. And that's where soft skills matter.

Moreover, here's another thread about Is QA Underrated?. It sparked an equally interesting discussion.

Quality Assurance Is Down. Call The Quality Assistance.

Antoine Craske explains the concept of Quality Assistance in relation to Quality Assurance and suggests how to implement it in a team or a company.

A good follow up read to that is his example of How Atlassian does Quality Assistance.

The world of Test Strategies

What are the different test strategies? Laveena Ramchandani and Chris Armstrong nicely described a few approaches.

But remember, sometimes Testing is not the Goal, as James Thomas rightly points out.

AUTOMATION

10 Quality Metrics That Let You Know Your Automation Is Successful

How do you know what value test automation brings to your projects and teams? Johanna South suggests using metrics to measure it and shares a handy list of examples.

10 CI/CD pipeline anti-patterns and how to overcome them

Continuous Development is a great practice — when done right. Peter Vollmer listed out the common pitfalls you may want to avoid.

Automated testing patterns

Here's a collection of best practices for test automation, including code examples and described in a clear way. Kudos, Luís Soares!

Related to that, Przemysław Paczoski shared whether it's better to have a Separate repository to store tests? Which, why, and when?.

Note: If you can't access the full article, simply open it in a private tab.

How to Assert Database State?

Vladimir Khorikov shared a very thorough and valuable read about testing code that's dealing with databases, providing several options of achieving good coverage.

Test Automation Framework: Build vs. Use vs. Buy

Given the number of tools for test automation nowadays, you may wonder whether it's better to build, use or just buy a solution. Moataz Nabil shows the pros and cons of each option.

Similarly, Marie Drake wrote a decent article about the Pillars of a Good Test Automation Framework.

TOOLS

A Collection of My Favorite Cypress Features

Cypress is full of cool features and here are Marie Drake's interesting top picks.

Speaking of that, you may also be interested in Gleb Bahmutov's guide to Faster User Object Creation in Cypress.

Cypress vs Playwright: Which is best for E2E testing?

Cypress and Playwright are similar tools. Cathal Mac Donnacha compares both in a concise, one-sentence list of the good and bad sides of each.

Furthermore, you might be interested in a step-by-step video tutorial to Writing a Playwright script testing/monitoring amazon.com by Giovanni Rago.

Karma JS Testing: What, Why, and How to Get Going Right Now

Carlos Schults gives a thorough overview of Karma — an open-source test runner for JavaScript tests — including plenty of code examples.

Test Your APIs Further Using HTTP Toolkit

Dennis Martinez gives a nice overview of HTTP Toolkit — an interesting tool for intercepting, debugging and mocking requests.

Furthermore, NaveenKumar Namachivayam described the functionality of a similar tool — HTTPie for Web and Desktop.

VIDEOS

You Need to Redefine Test Automation

Software Testing Magazine has recently resurfaced this gem and I thought it would be worth sharing with you. It's a 50-minute talk about Redefining Test Automation given by Richard Bradshaw at SeleniumConf two years ago.

AND...

Herd immunity... 🤣

Thanks for reading!

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