Issue 176

COMMENT

Welcome to the 176th issue!

Big news came out this week.

After years of development in beta, Appium 2.0 has officially been released!

This popular tool for testing mobile, desktop and TV apps brings some exciting new features.

You can read all about it in the migration guide.

Congrats to Jonathan Lipps and the team behind this amazing open-source project.

I can tell you one thing — it was well worth the wait.

So, happy testing! 🙂

NEWS

A simple step to drastically improve Quality Assurance

Marko Milojevic wrote a great article about the significance of the whole-team approach to quality, giving some practical tips on how to make it happen.

Also, Ben Barden reminds us about an important thing: Don't ignore the small things in software quality.

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

How to advocate for testability

Sometimes in order to make testing easier, your project may require special features. John Gluck advises how to influence this shift in your team.

Software Testing for 20 years

Patrick Prill shares some great stories and lessons learned after reflecting on his 20-year career in software testing.

And in a slightly related fashion, Kylie Bremer describes The evolution of Quality Engineering based on her learnings.

Tester's Guide To Navigating The Wild West Of Web3 Testing

If Web3 is the future of the internet, so is testing it. Interested to learn what it takes? Rafaela Azevedo wrote a high-level overview.

The essence of Mental Models for Software Testers

Tester's job is primarily about thinking. Balaji Santhanagopalan lists a few mental models for testers that can help them improve at their jobs.

AUTOMATION

AI Testing — Measures and Scores, Part 1

Jeff Nyman started a detailed series of articles on practical approaches to testing AI and ML. You can also read the second part about the importance of data.

Boundaries Unbounded

You might have heard of the Boundary-value analysis — one of the techniques used in test design. Michael Bolton explains why there's more to it than usually believed.

iOS: UI Testing Strategy and Tooling at Reddit

This is an excellent overview of how Reddit approaches testing their iOS mobile app — from strategy to test reporting. Kudos to Lakshya Kapoor, Parth Parikh and Abey Thomas for sharing this with us!

On that note, I also recommend revisiting Reddit's E2E UI Automation Framework for Android, put together by Dinesh Gunda and Denis Ruckebusch.

With this, never miss updating your existing automated tests

If your team happens to miss updating tests after adding a new feature, Sajitha Pathirana has come up with an idea on how to prevent that programmatically.

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

What are your biggest challenges when writing/running E2E tests?

It's insightful to see the challenges people face in their day-to-day test automation. Many of them mentioned flaky tests, which leads me to sharing with you another interesting thread: What are your thoughts on allowing test retries?.

TOOLS

"One tool to rule them all…"

Does a perfect testing tool exist? Louis-Philip Grenier reminds us why it's important not to get biased and hyped towards the most trendy tools and to stay true to the ultimate deciding factor — your project's and team's situation.

Comparing Automated Testing Tools: Cypress, Selenium, Playwright, and Puppeteer

Wondering how the most popular testing tools compare in terms of performance, such as test execution speed? Have a look at this thorough analysis by Luc Gagan.

Luc has also written A Comparative Analysis of Playwright Adoption vs Cypress and Selenium.

Chrome for Testing: A Game-Changer for Web App Testing and Automation

Joe Colantonio tells us more about the latest helpful solution from Google — Chrome for Testing — a special version of the browser dedicated specifically to web testing and automation.

How to Build an Intelligent QA Chatbot on your data with LLM or ChatGPT

There's been a lot of buzz around how ChatGPT can help testers. But what about building your own bot and training it with your internal QA knowledge? Mahesh Rajput came up with this original idea and now shows how to implement it — step by step.

Playwright Page Object Model Boilerplate Project

Looking for a good headstart to writing tests with Playwright? Angelo Loria created a handy playwright-boilerplate that you can adopt.

Furthermore, Madeline Caples explains how to use Playwright's VS Code Extension for convenient test implementation.

VIDEOS

Software Testing Interview Questions To Know

In this 31-minute video, Daniel Knott shares a comprehensive overview of possible questions you may hear during the interview as a software tester and gives a lot of tips on how to answer them.

The Best Test: "API Test Planning – LIVE!"

When it comes to APIs, your testing is often as good as the test cases you come up with. Follow along with Gil Zilberfeld's recording as he prepares a test plan for a calculator API.

AND...

When tester finds a bug... 🤣

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 176 July 8th 2023