Welcome to the 154th issue!

Is Selenium still worth it?

In the age of Cypress, Playwright, Webdriver.io, and many other tools improving the experience of testing web apps, this question is more relevant than ever.

For example, I found this Reddit thread:

Selenium: What am I missing about this tool?

It sparked a big discussion with some interesting points. Have a look.

Happy testing!

Dawid Dylowicz

That's a good question, not only from the perspective of the manager but also someone thinking of joining a company as the first tester. Vincent Ferreira shares his opinion.

And if you're looking for a new opportunity, Sławomir Radzymiński advises on Maximizing Your Employability as a Software Engineer in Test.

Have you faced a similar problem too? There are some good pieces of advice from the community.

You may also want to check out this thread: As a QA, how do you deal with escaped defects?

This is a wonderful overview by Stuart Thomas of how they approached creating a company-wide quality strategy.

Michael Bolton explains why the noble focus on preventing issues is just part of the success story and why we shouldn't aim to eliminate the testing role from development teams entirely.

Rodrigo Costa explains why it's essential to think from the user perspective while developing and testing a product rather than only relying on predefined requirements.

Andreea Draniceanu simply explains the test pyramid, including the pros, cons and best practices.

Wondering how combining test automation with exploratory testing can improve your testing process? Millan Kaul provides some examples.

If you're using one of the object-oriented programming languages to write your tests, you might be interested in this nice overview of good practices by Sandeep. And to see how to apply it in Java Selenium tests, check out the second part.

Rasmus Ursem suggests an interesting way to make TDD more efficient by using both top-bottom and bottom-up approaches.

Paul Grizzaffi highlights the common problem with test automation and reminds us of the actual goal.

Using Kubernetes? Dejan Pejčev explains how to test it using a helpful open-source tool specifically created for that purpose — Testkube.

Eugene Gronski wrote a great overview of Playwright, showing examples of implementing a test using the Page Object Model.

Furthermore, Nikolay Advolodkin shares some good advice on Mastering Playwright: How to Create Effective Page Objects.

Testing iOS mobile apps? Dan Smith put together a detailed getting-started guide to iOS test automation in XCode.

Feeling like your Cypress tests are running slow? Jöel Grimberg shares a few pieces of advice that may be causing that and shows examples of solving these problems.

Also, Kailash Pathak wrote a helpful guide instructing How to Perform React Component Testing using Cypress.

Exciting news from Microsoft! They've just open-sourced HydraLab — a framework that allows you to build your own test device platform in the cloud.

Kelvin Muliamin wrote a detailed guide to Postman, including a lot of practical examples of using its vast range of features.

The book An Introduction to General Systems Thinking is considered one of the must-reads for testers. Željko Filipin shares his opinion about it.

Lisa Crispin wrote a short review of the Grokking Continuous Delivery book that helps you understand the key concepts of continuous delivery.

If you're looking for a simple explanation of heuristics in testing, take a look at this full-of-examples 13-min video by Daniel Knott.

Surely no bugs in this pull request... 😂

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