Welcome to the 135th issue!

And welcome back! 🙌

It was great to switch off and take a well-deserved break. I definitely feel refreshed and full of energy.

So today, let's start with an article that got my attention:

Why should testers start writing blogs? by Balaji Santhanagopalan.

You see, I've been running this newsletter for over 2.5 years now and I've seen many first-time writers that shared great content. I've featured many of them here.

I truly believe everyone has something interesting to share, even when they're just starting in software testing. And writing is a great way to get visibility, build your brand, and even learn something new.

So if you're still hesitating, give it a try! And don't forget to share with me. 🙂

Happy testing!

Dawid Dylowicz

It's not rare to feel worse than you actually are. Many engineers have a lot of concerns compared to others. Testers are no different. Here are a lot of opinions, lessons learned and pieces of advice shared by the community on Reddit.

Also, sometimes it may Feel like I am burning out. Here's some advice on how to overcome that.

If you're hiring testers, you might be interested in Dennis Martinez's article explaining why it's important to prepare for hiring and how to make the process more effective for you and the candidate.

Moreover, Daria Kudryavtseva wrote a great guide to Onboarding a Senior QA: week-by-week plan.

Following up on the one year in testing reflection that Atul Jha shared last year, here are his lessons learned after two years in testing.

Inspired by the famous Japanese art, Andrew Knight describes eight valuable lessons that he learned in his software testing career.

Formulating good requirements is crucial to successful testing. So how do you deal with the non-functional ones? Yaroslav Dobroskok gives some advice and shares a few good examples.

In yet another great deep dive, Antoine Craske explains the architectural transformation that Zalando has gone through and how it impacted the quality practices in their team.

You might also be interested in learning Joep Schuurkes's view on Quality: different purposes, different definitions.

Asserting big API responses can get burdensome. So is there a better way? Patrick Prill shows how to improve the clarity of assertions by using the Fluent Interface design pattern.

Page Object is a great pattern, but it can get even better. Elias Nogueira shares a great guide to optimising the wait strategy.

Christian Nissen wrote a decent article describing the various checks you can set up in your pipeline to increase the confidence of stable releases.

There are also other things you can do to improve the process as Sam Connelly explains in the article: Meh to awesome pipelines.

Ever wondered what testability means? And how you can influence it? Well, Oleksandr Romanov has got you covered with this excellent overview.

That's a great reminder from Gleb Bahmutov about leveraging APIs to support testing web apps. Lots of examples included.

If you're using Cypress to test your apps, you may want to learn about Elisha Dongol's examples of five dos and don'ts.

How about using your existing end-to-end tests for load testing? Katarzyna Kmiotek shows how you can achieve it with Artillery and Playwright.

If you're looking for a quick way to set up different test levels in Node, here's a handy guide with code examples by Dávid Szabó.

Looking for ways of testing Kubernetes? Shivam Katare shows how to set up and run TestKube — an open-source tool for the job.

There are plenty of tools for web accessibility testing. Here's a helpful overview of ten of them prepared and described by Marie Cruz.

Željko Filipin wrote a nice review of the Exploratory Software Testing book including a short summary and quotes.

Speaking of that, you might also be interested in Venkat Ramakrishnan's thoughts on Exploratory Testing Demystified.

Ah, automation... 😂

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