Someone asked this two-part question on Reddit:

While I'm not sure if it was a genuine worry based on old stereotypes or just trolling, I want to give a clear answer to that.

1. Yes, there is a real skill in software testing. Tons of skills, in fact. A software tester is the most versatile role in software development. You really need skills in every area: business domain knowledge, technical skills and user's point of view. There's no other role that can link all these. Take it out and hell breaks loose.
2. No, it's not a dying trade. Far from that. While automation might replace some manual tasks and roles may eventually change — software testing will not go away. Want proof? Just take out testing from all the projects and see what happens to the world. That would be much worse than COVID-19, I swear. And no matter how hard we try, no devs nor machines will be capable of taking over all of the software testing responsibilities anytime soon. This is why QA roles exist. This is why DevOps roles exist.

We have access to the best tools to date. We have access to the best knowledge sources to date. And yet, the demand for tech talent is constantly increasing. If you ask me, there has never been a better time to be a software tester by profession than now. It's not dying — it's blooming.

Stay strong everyone.

PS. We're back on Twitter! After just a month of accidental suspension, Twitter has finally apologised and unlocked @QANewsletter.

Dawid Dylowicz

This is a MASSIVE list of software testing courses put together by Unmesh Gundecha. You can find lots and lots of links to both free and paid resources about pretty much everything you would like to learn about. Big thanks for that!

While there's a lot of possible answers to this question and I'd encourage everyone to stop and think about them, Łukasz Makuch focused on one particular aspect of how psychology may affect our testing decisions. Good food for thought.

A lot of conferences have been cancelled or postponed as mentioned a few weeks ago. This created a new path for the ones that moved online. It makes me happy to see that there's nearly a dozen on Chris Kenst's list already!

Luís Soares shares about the anti-patterns in test automation and gives some good pieces of advice. It's in the context of unit tests in the Test-Driven Development approach but I find it easily applicable to higher-level tests as well.

Similarly to the one above, in this article Rafaela Azevedo also elaborates on possible anti-patterns but focusing on building a test automation framework only. Huge kudos for the code examples — this makes it very easy to understand!

This is the main challenge I've set for myself when I was the only QA in a startup. It's also one of the strongest messages coming from Modern Testing Principles, of which I'm a strong follower. So naturally, I liked this article by Dennis Martinez who gives in-depth advice on how to get devs involved in automated tests.

Testing microservices has always been challenging but we may have yet another way to deal with it. This is thanks to Kyriacos Elia's test kite — an alternative to the famous test pyramid.

PS. It's a premium article on Medium, so if you can't access it, simply open the link in a private tab.

If you are into testing accessibility (and we all should be), check out this great overview of tools that support testing, prepared by Martín Collazo. Automation tools? Browser extensions? You'll find it all there!

Vinayak Titti did a great job comparing the most popular test automation tools by describing their purpose and their pros and cons. You'll find everything here: from open-source Selenium and Cypress to powerful AI-based commercial tools.

So, having talked about all these tools... which one is the one to use?! Mark Winteringham gave it a shot. Careful — this might not be the answer you would expect! 😉

A few weeks ago I mentioned a book by Viv Richards about the experience of 80 software testers from around the world. Inspired by that project, Stephan Kämper and Maik Nogens came up with a similar idea to create an eBook focusing on testers who work from home. They're just starting, so you can contribute too!

Have you heard of scream testing yet?... 😅