Software Testing Weekly – The Best Software Testing News

COMMENT

Welcome to the 301st issue!

Two years ago, we learned how Reddit approaches the eternal fight with flaky tests.

Today, I'm happy to share with you the second part of that journey, delivered by Abinodh Thomas:

From Fragile to Agile Part II: The Sequence-based Dynamic Test Quarantine System.

There's some good inspiration there.

Happy testing! 🙂

NEWS

Am I the only one that finds QA easier than Dev?

I regularly see people asking about switching between dev and QA, and this thread offers some good insights into what it takes.

And it's not only me — John Caleb Pananganan has also noticed this trend of Developers Wanting to Move to QA, and QA Wanting to Move to Development, including the follow-up second part.

AI did not break testing

Is our profession really stuck? Katja Obring makes a few good points on why we should share and apply our testing knowledge, especially now.

Similarly, Amalie Shi shares interesting thoughts after attending a webinar about How to Coexist with AI as a Tester.

How to sustainably elevate your Quality Assurance in practice

If you want to improve your QA processes, Viviane Hennecke and Ralf Kleinhietpass share their approach focused on putting people first, adjusting roles and leveraging AI for support.

Similarly, Tamar Baratashvili has a few solid points on how Testers Help Products Become What They Were Meant to Be.

Releases should be smooth, fast, and boring

I really like this statement by Elizabeth Zagroba. As a vision, that's what we should aim for.

Furthermore, Michael Tomara wonders about Calculating the QA: Not So Simple in search for the perfect dev-to-QA ratio.

Quality Control Layer: The Rise of Testing?

How do you keep quality when AI builds most of the software? Yanir Taflev reflects on changing responsibilities of testers to keep adding value.

Moreover, Rodrigo Alves Costa brings up an important point on Why Manual Testing is More Relevant in the Age of AI.

AUTOMATION

Automation test branching and environments preparation

In order to enable collaboration between testers, Muhammad Ahyar Ibrahim Aldebaran came up with a way of handling tests per environment using sandbox, staging and master branches.

Chain of Responsibility for Test Setup: Make Test Data Read Like a Spec

Vera Marczenko gives plenty of practical advice on how to improve the "arrange" part in tests. It's followed by another article about AI-Generated Test Data: Powerful, Dangerous, or Both?.

I stopped writing E2E tests manually. I manage an AI agent instead

Bold claim, Antony Fuentes! But as the saying goes, there might be a method to this madness, as explained here in detail.

From Fragile Locators to Unbreakable Tests: Semantic Similarity with Sentence Embeddings

Suryakanta Mohapatra shares a technical deep dive into how they achieved auto-locator healing using the all-MiniLM-L6-v2 sentence transformer model.

TOOLS

Building a Scalable Automation Framework with Playwright + TypeScript: Part 7

Rajesh Yemul continues a great series of articles showing practical code examples to create a full-fledged test automation framework with Playwright. This part focuses on assertions.

Moreover, Sajith Dilshan shows a few tricks to speed up Playwright tests by Mastering Non-Linear Execution with Async/Await Patterns.

Checkmate — Stop Writing Test Scripts, Start Describing Tests

Kulanthaivelu Sankaran describes a handy, open-source AI agent solution for generating tests using natural language commands called Checkmate.

Cypress.Promise.all() and cy.mapChain(): Two Hidden Gems for Cypress You Won't Let Go Once You Try Them

If you're looking to improve your Cypress tests, Sebastian Clavijo Suero demonstrates commands that can help you handle async patterns.

Data Driven API Testing in Java with Rest-Assured and TestNG

Mohammad Faisal Khatri created a comprehensive, step-by-step guide to setting up an API test framework with REST-assured. You can access the following part 2, part 3 and part 4.

Extension Hooks in Promptfoo: Building a Custom LLM Testing Pipeline That Adapts at Runtime

Testing LLMs? Irfan Mujagić gives a nice overview of how to achieve that with Promptfoo.

Similarly, Meryem Sakin has also written a good article about Testing AI Agents in CI Pipelines (Promptfoo + Golden Traces).

VIDEOS

Vibe Coding SDET workflow: Claude + Docker + Playwright + CI automation

This might be helpful to many of you looking to use AI to aid test automation. Alex Khvastovich recorded an 18-minute overview demonstrating his setup.

AND...

Some bugs be like... 😂

Thanks for reading!

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Issue 301 February 3rd 2026