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.

Dawid Dylowicz

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

Herd immunity... 🤣

Thanks for reading!

If you like this newsletter and it helps you become a better tester, you can say thanks and buy me a coffee.

Dawid Dylowicz