Welcome to the 190th issue!

Among all the recent worries about the future of testers — given the expansion of AI, the difficult job market and burnouts — I found this positive thread relieving:

What do you like about QA?

Personally, I enjoy the most working on different challenges, varying from engineering to people, and finding problems that others missed.

And what about you?

Happy testing! 🙂

PS. You may also check out a similar reflection that I shared a while ago.

Dawid Dylowicz

So, contrary to the question in the Comment section of this issue, Jayateerth Katti lists some things he doesn't enjoy so much about being a tester. Do you agree?

Perhaps one of the things to do is to Smash the Barrier Between Development and QA, as per Dennis Martinez's advice.

Alan Page shares his opinion on why testers are not the only ones who can test and what benefits it brings when developers take over.

Also, someone on Reddit raised an interesting Argument: QAs are better suited to be part of Business Function.

Ravisuriya Eswara started a series of articles on performance engineering. I enjoyed this one about KPIs as well as the next one about Prioritizing Performance & Its Requirements — The Two Engineering Tasks.

What should testers do to be the most impactful in their job? Gil Avraham gives some great pieces of advice.

Similarly, Callum Akehurst-Ryan wrote a decent one about Career Progression in Testing: The Awesome Power of Influence.

Having worked in both environments, I can relate to Elena Kolbanova reflections on working for small and big companies as a tester.

Also, Denis Peganov rightly explains Why Agile is Essential in Testing and What Happens Without It.

If you followed Jason Arbon's content, you'd have known by now he's a big promoter of AI in testing. So it may surprise you to hear the critique of using ChatGPT for test automation, right? Well, read why!

As a follow-up read, I recommend Michael Bolton's articles about A Reply to "Running a crowd-sourced experiment on using LLMs for testing", including the Part 2: Analysis.

Anji Boddupally shares the second part of examples of design patterns that can be used during test automation.

Moreover, Earl Lacsamana explains very well the concept of Test-Driven Development: A Different Way to Achieve Quality Code.

Working with databases and writing SQL is something that you may encounter in your job as a tester. But how often? The testing community replies.

Facing a challenge to develop a modern test automation solution, Rio Anggara Pratama shares the motive, story and evaluation they did to choose the right tools and CI solution.

While the DRY approach is not always recommended in test automation, sometimes it's handy to use the features of languages such as Java or C# that allow you to write generic, reusable code. Gil Avraham gives a few good examples of that.

Andrea Fuentes tells us about the importance of performance testing and shows how to set up and run such tests with JMeter.

Similarly, Srinivas Nali explains how to use AWS Lambda load testing with JMeter.

If you're looking for a modern, open-source performance testing tool, here's a solid getting-started guide to Locust by Virendra Oswal.

Jeevakirtan Palanisamy shows how to implement a custom, smart retry mechanism for your tests with Mocha.

Moreover, you may also want to use A Flexible Method for Retrying Selenium Operations.

Dev's reaction to 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.

Dawid Dylowicz