Issue 167

COMMENT

Welcome to the 167th issue!

This week, I want to share with you something I rediscovered recently:

Test Desiderata by Kent Beck.

It's a wonderful set of test automation principles — each accompanied by a short video.

Keep them in mind when writing your next test.

Happy testing! 🙂

NEWS

Designing for Failure in Software Development and Testing

System failures happen. Peter Okorafor advises how we can better prepare to react to them rather than try to avoid them completely.

Exploratory Testing: Why Is It Not Ideal for Agile Projects?

Exploratory testing has some great benefits. But Vitaly Prus explains why it's not the best choice sometimes.

QA team as a fire department

Dmytro Stekanov describes the practices QA teams can do to better prepare for unplanned work.

The Art of Testing: How I Plan and Prioritize Tasks for Effective and Quality Results (Tech)

M M Kishore shares their way of planning testing according to the challenge at hand.

Also, wondering when is the best time to test? James Thomas suggests to Test Now.

The Common Challenges as a Software Tester and How I Overcome

Ravisuriya Eswara gives plenty of pieces of practical advice on overcoming challenges that testers can face at work. Here you can read the first part and the second part.

AUTOMATION

A Guide to Automated Testing of Machine Learning Models — Chapter 1

Want to learn more about testing machine learning systems? Toni Ramchandani wrote a handy guide. Here's the second chapter about the challenges and solutions in test automation.

5 Handy Websites to Learn How To Write Unit Tests

If you want to learn how to do unit testing or empower your team to do so, here are some great resources to practice.

Enabling fault-tolerant HTTP abstractions in Android apps with Resilience4j, Testcontainers, and Toxiproxy

Do chaos engineering principles apply to mobile apps? Yes, and Ubiratan Soares shows how to automate it on Android.

How have you reduced automation execution times?

Long-running tests are one of the common problems in test automation. Here's a helpful thread on Reddit where people share their methods to cut down on test execution time.

Also, someone wonders: How do you guys handle slow environments causing tests to fail?

Improve quality with functional & API testing

Team Merlin explains how to combine different test levels to achieve good test coverage.

Furthermore, Sajitha Pathirana gives a few handy Tips to integrate E2E testing into your existing test strategy.

Note: If you can't access the full article, open it in a private tab or another browser.

What is my SLO and how do I test It?

Service Level Objectives are important metrics of service performance. Sarah Zipkin wrote a great, detailed guide to measuring them using k6.

TOOLS

Build Cross-Platform Native Mobile Automation Test with WebdriverIO Like a Pro

Amr Salem explains how to set up a cross-platform test framework using WebdriverIO that enables writing tests for both Android and iOS apps.

That's one of the answers for someone who's looking for an Automation Tool that can handle BOTH Web and Mobile App testing.

Is Cucumber dying? Not so fast with this funeral!

I'm happy to see the community responding to the news I shared last week. Here's Daniel Delimata explaining possible scenarios for Cucumber's future.

Note: If you can't access the full article, open it in a private tab or another browser.

Mastering cy.wrap: 6 Essential Steps for Effective Testing in Cypress

Ayhan Metin describes the common use cases of a handy cy.wrap() feature in Cypress.

Powerful Firefox Developer Tools

We all know Chrome DevTools, but did you know Firefox also has its own? Atharva Shah gives a brief overview.

What is the Spock framework, and why do you need to use it to test your application?

If you write tests in Java, you might be interested in Thamayanthy Gogulan's guide to Spock — an open-source test tool.

VIDEOS

Now SelectorsHub is integrated with ChatGPT

SelectorsHub — the popular Chrome extension created by Sanjay Kumar — has recently announced integrated support from ChatGPT that helps you fix XPath and selector syntax. Here's a 7-minute overview of this feature.

Software Testing Tools in Visual Studio

Visual Studio Code is one of the most popular IDEs at the moment. And it has some cool testing features, as explained in this 31-minute overview by Wendy Breiding.

AND...

Testers aren't joking... 😂

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.

Issue 167 May 5th 2023