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NEWS
Mastering T-Shaped Skills: A Comprehensive Guide for Software Engineers in Test
Sławomir Radzymiński explains why investing in growing valuable skills is essential and suggests what type of skills software testers can focus on.
Also, from a more practical perspective, someone is wondering: What does an experienced tester look like?
Modernizing The Five Phases of a Software Tester's Mental Life
In this thought-provoking article, Rasmus Ursem revisits the phases of a person's testing mindset and suggests a new addition focused on TDD.
Similarly, Krisnawan Hartanto suggests using Lateral Thinking in Software Testing.
Note: If you can't access the full article, simply open it in a private tab.
QA Tester Jobs Guide 2023 (Salaries, Careers, and Education)
Curious to know what it takes to secure a software tester's job? Jason Boog compiled a handy guide about it.
Furthermore, you might also want to learn from Elvira Riianova about How to Become a Software Test Automation Engineer Step by Step.
And finally, here's some advice from Dilkushi Jayaweera on Moving from Manual Testing to Test Automation.
Quality: an often misunderstood concept
Siddharth Ram explains why meeting or slightly overreaching specifications is enough to deliver valuable quality.
On the other hand, Elvira Riianova warns that Testing Does NOT Improve Quality.
AUTOMATION
Flaky Tests are Not the Problem
I think flaky tests can actually be more useful than non-flaky tests.
This is an intriguing point of view from Grunet. Curious why? Read about the arguments.
Integrating Integration Test Automation into Application Code
Integration tests have their pros and cons. Christian Nissen gives a few tips on maximising their benefits.
Slow Down! You're Running Automation Way Too Fast
Waiting in tests is generally seen as an antipattern. But Paul Grizzaffi has a different opinion, especially about the waits that simulate real user behaviour.
What are we losing when we are not writing tests for our code?
By using a simple example, Warish Ansari illustrates the difference between writing and not writing tests during development.
Furthermore, we may also learn from Paulo Evangelista's experience on How testing as a QA Analyst improved my engineering skills.
Why Dumb Tests are Smart
Roy Straub gives a few good reasons why writing more descriptive tests is better than trying to optimise for reduced duplication.
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Testkube empowers testers and developers to orchestrate and execute tests natively in Kubernetes. It allows testing tools — like Postman, k6, Cypress, Gradle, and JMeter — to run inside Kubernetes clusters and display detailed results in a centralized, easy-to-use dashboard. Try it out now.
TOOLS
Avoid Flaky Tests in Cypress
If your Cypress tests tend to fail randomly, you may want to try out these tips from Dilkushi Jayaweera.
Chrome's Headless mode gets an upgrade: introducing --headless=new
Big news from Chrome! The headless mode of this browser just got significantly more powerful. Mathias Bynens and Peter Kvitek explain what changed and what benefits it brings.
Docker for QA Engineers
If you're wondering how containerisation with Docker can help you with test automation, Charithra Janani lists out a few reasons.
Get Ahead of Bugs: How to Identify High-Risk Areas in Your QA Testing Strategy
Tadas Stankevicius shows how to use Google Sheets to visually represent data about bugs extracted from Jira.
How to create integration tests for an API server with 90% Code Coverage in 1 hour without writing any code
In the previous issue, I mentioned Pythagora — an open-source tool for automatic API and database test generation. Here's more info about the project from the creator, Zvonimir Sabljić.
The Browser Automation Newbie Experience
Maaret Pyhäjärvi shares learnings from using Playwright and Selenium to automate web app tests with newbies.
AND...
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.
COMMENT
Welcome to the 157th issue!
Postman has announced big restrictions to its local-only Collection Runner, affecting a lot of free and paid users.
Not only it's a drastic change for their customers, but also at short notice of just one month.
As expected, many people were furious and took it to Reddit, where a big discussion started: RIP Postman.
If you or your team use the tool, check how it will work after the upcoming changes on March 15th.
Despite that, I wish you happy testing!
Dawid Dylowicz