Welcome to the 197th issue!

How about a testing challenge for the last month of the year?

Justas Laužadis invites us to try the Advent of white-box testing.

Each day focuses on a different task, and you can do it either on a side or while working on your company projects — it's totally up to you!

In fact, it reminds me of the famous 30-day testing challenges by Ministry of Testing.

So, happy testing! 🙂

Dawid Dylowicz

If you're looking for high-level global data and stats about software testing, here's a helpful collection with links to the sources.

Well said, Joep Schuurkes! It's a great attempt to explain what the tester's role is really about.

Also, Mirek Długosz asks: Are observability and monitoring part of testing?

Elizabeth Zagroba shares an honest story of, quite literally, turning bugs into features and the lessons she learned from that.

Similarly, Ben Byrne tells another story about finding issues early with QA, Hockey Sticks, and Carrots.

Someone's asking the Reddit community of testers about the biggest struggles they face in their day-to-day job. Well, there are lots of interesting answers.

This is a good overview of the test pyramid, showing the possible variations, pros and cons, and explaining why it's still relevant.

It's a great guide by Akhyar Kamili that explains how to help teams focus more on practising unit testing while staying realistic with the expectations.

A good complimentary read to that is Dan Kushner's take on The Challenges of Achieving 100% Test Coverage.

Reshma Sujith tells us how they moved from testing native mobile apps to testing React Native apps with a new test framework.

Also, Paul Samuels explains more about Mobile UI testing with Maestro, using an iOS app as an example.

Konstantin Borimechkov tells us how doing test automation as part of development has helped him become a better engineer and what lessons he's learned from that.

Looking for places to learn and practice security testing? I shared one resource a few weeks ago, but here's more, thanks to Lisi Hocke.

If you're interested in learning the differences between the three popular test frameworks, namely Cypress, Playwright and Selenium, then here's a high-level comparison with a handy table at the end.

Lana Begunova explains how this handy trick of deep linking in mobile apps lets you go directly to the screen you want to test.

Lana also shows how to Find Mobile Elements with Robust Appium Locator Strategies and Selectors.

If you use JMeter for load testing, NaveenKumar Namachivayam has some good news. He created Hamster — a handy macOS tool that allows you to quickly launch previous test plans.

Arseny Fedorov demonstrates how Kaspresso can improve your Android tests. If you tested using Espresso before, you'll likely notice the difference.

Similarly, Kseniya Nikitina shows How to make Espresso tests more readable and stable using Kaspresso, too.

Cypress has some powerful capabilities for component testing, and Thamodi Wickramasinghe gives a decent overview of them.

The 1.40.0 release of Playwright brought a handy feature that speeds up creating assertions. Jarad Saunders explains it in this short, 5-minute video.

I enjoyed watching the discussion between Nikolay Advolodkin and Daniel Knott about testing mobile apps.

Tester's workout routine... 🤣

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