Welcome to the 187th issue!

If there's only one thing you can read this week, it should be this:

How Microsoft does QA by Gergely Orosz.

It's full of insights, such as the origins of the SDET role or the transition into the test pyramid.

You can learn even more from the discussion under this LinkedIn post, as well as this clarification on some of the concepts mentioned in the original article.

So, happy testing! 🙂

Dawid Dylowicz

There's an ongoing discussion in the community about the capabilities of AI in testing. Here, Jason Arbon outlines how it can help with exploratory testing.

However, keep in mind that generative AI, such as ChatGPT, might be Reliably Unreliable, as Michael Bolton warns.

In this article, Madeline Van Der Paelt explains how DevOps culture impacts the modern approach to testing.

Inevitably, it leads to discussions such as this big one on Reddit: Anyone here tired of companies eliminating QA and expecting dev to do testing?

This is a great explanation by Amy Stuart of the importance of having a stable test environment in your company.

What may also help is practising Chaos Engineering to check the stability and reliability of services, as per Artem Savytskyi's suggestion.

In an honest way, Dennis Martinez shares some career advice for getting better pay as a tester.

Using an interview coding task as an opportunity to experiment and learn, Aleksei Parfentjev shows the structure, design and approach to setting up a test framework for UI and API.

Speaking of test design, there are a few suggestions on using the Page Object Model for simple click/type methods.

Edgar Miró shares a detailed story of how they approached contract testing in their company and what they learned.

If you want to find out about memory leaks in your Android app, Danil Perevalov wrote a handy guide explaining how to use LeakCanary during UI tests.

Furthermore, Sergio Sastre Florez describes how to do Cross-Library Screenshot Testing with AndroidUiTestingUtils 2.0.0.

Ryan Craven gives a few reasons why we shouldn't aim for 100% test automation.

And in the final part of the series, Gil Zilberfeld tells us about The 4 Attributes of Testability: Reproducibility.

If you want to learn in detail how to improve your Cypress tests' readability with custom actions, here's a decent guide by Anshita Bhasin.

Did you know you can use snapshot tests to measure the performance degradation of your frontend? Here's an intriguing example in Jest by Kiet Lau.

Hasan Gürhan shows a few practical tricks on speeding up your Playwright tests, including built-in parallelism, sharding and CI config.

Moreover, Vitaliy Potapov wrote a handy guide to Generating BDD tests with ChatGPT and running them with Playwright.

There are many bug-reporting productivity tools available on the market, and this thread shows what people prefer to use.

In case you haven't read it yet, Nicola Lindgren wrote a handy overview of the classic Lessons Learned in Software Testing book.

2000s vs 2020s... 😂

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