Welcome to the 172nd issue!

Today, I want to share with you a fantastic new project — Rayrun.

It's a collection of 70+ testing and development productivity tools — all in one place!

There's also a handy AI chatbot for Playwright to answer all your questions.

Kudos to Luc Gagan for creating it.

Happy testing! 🙂

Dawid Dylowicz

Vincent Ferreira gives us some advice on how to empower teams to take care of quality when there are no dedicated testers.

And one of the practices could be involving the team in Bug Hunting: time to explore your app and find bugs while having fun with your team, as Bruna Chagas explains.

Shift-left testing is not only about automation. Millan Kaul explains four practices that can help your team make a move.

In relation to that, Ilya Shubinsky wrote a good article about Reliable releases: Focus on the product not on the feature.

Soft skills are essential to succeed in the tester's role. Here are some of the uncommon ones described by M M Kishore.

Also, Kristin Jackvony reminds us to be mindful of Logical Fallacies for Testers VI: The Bandwagon Fallacy.

In this interesting article, Ulisses Paulo Costa Filho explores areas in which AI could help software testers in the future.

However, James Bach explains why we should also start Thinking Critically About AI.

Team Merlin clarifies what test automation is about and why it's not a silver bullet.

Similarly, John Gluck describes a few Automated test data management smells and anti-patterns.

Vijay Rangan shows some great examples of designing the code to make test automation easier.

On top of that, Paul Grizzaffi advises using a fuzzing strategy to Kill More Bugs! Add Randomization To Your Web Testing.

Someone on Reddit wonders whether automation is always the way to go. This started a big, insightful discussion that includes many opinions and pieces of advice.

Similarly, Nixon Augustin asks an important question: What causes test automation chaos in most companies?

Amr Salem wrote a solid, thorough guide to running mobile tests with WebdriverIO on CI.

You may also want to learn from Alexey Alter-Pesotskiy about How to access app logs from UI Tests on iOS.

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

This is a must-read. Nikolay Advolodkin has recently refreshed his exhaustive collection of tips on test automation with tons of examples. Thanks!

Speaking of best practices, Gil Zilberfeld wonders: Is The Test Pyramid Still Relevant?

If you want to run your Cypress tests across many browsers in parallel, here's a helpful guide by Alex Sanzhanov on making it happen with Docker.

Also, Rody Bothe tells the story of How GitLab Review apps helped us shift testing left into the development cycle.

Mike Harris gives a helpful overview of the test parameterisation feature in various frameworks, using Playwright as an example.

Furthermore, Sergei Gapanovich shows A better way to control before and after blocks with test titles.

OWASP ZAP is one of the most popular open-source tools for web security testing. But did you know you can use it with Selenium? Renzo Parente explains how.

If you like using BDD with Playwright tests, you might be happy to find out that the 3.3.0 version of Serenity/JS brings support for Playwright Test UI mode, as explained by Jan Molak.

Despite being one of the most popular and standardised tools for web automation, Selenium is challenged by newer tools such as Cypress and Playwright. However, Zhimin Zhan claims it's still the best tool for the job.

But if you want to try something else, Aravind Subbarao explains The Karate Advantage: 5 Compelling Reasons to Switch from Selenium for Test Automation.

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

In this insightful 29-minute recording, Alan Richardson describes the key concepts of software testing: test cases and test scripts.

If you want to learn about visual testing with Playwright, here's a good 23-minute overview by Jared from CommitQuality.

This is why we test... 🤣

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