Welcome to the 198th issue!

I once heard this:

And this week, I found an intriguing story that explains why:

Maybe Getting Rid of the QA Team was Bad, Actually.

Sure, some companies do fine without separate QA roles, as I mentioned a few months ago.

But getting there requires absolute discipline, engineering excellence and leadership support. Most companies don't have that.

So thanks for sharing it, David Caudill. And for reminding us why we should keep advocating for quality.

Happy testing! 🙂

Dawid Dylowicz

What a famous phrase! If you're curious where it may come from, Jose A. Pardo wrote a decent breakdown of the possible causes.

Testing is an intellectually intensive job and, in the wrong environment, it can sometimes lead to burnout. There's a ton of support and advice from people on what to do and how to avoid that.

Also, avoid falling into Logical Fallacies for Testers XII: The Slippery Slope Fallacy, as Kristin Jackvony explains.

Dennis Martinez shares several practices that can help maintain quality while increasing development velocity.

Furthermore, Chris Kenst briefly explains the concepts of Observability, Monitoring and Testing and the meaning of the TOAD acronym in that context.

Curious how testers perceive the recent progress in AI capabilities? Richard Bradshaw asked the community and shared some interesting results.

Team Merlin advises breaking down tests into purposeful test suites to reduce execution time while maintaining good test coverage.

Also, How do you assure top quality of testing without compromising on delivery time?

Many of you may wonder whether there are languages better suited for testing and what they may be. Here's what the community thinks.

In another thread, someone asked: What language is more popular for QA automation — Java or Python?

It's an interesting concept, originally published in the Continuous Performance Testing in Virtual Time research paper, that Som Sinha summarises here.

Also, you can learn more about Continuous Performance Testing.

Laura Vuorenoja describes the path they went through to get better at measuring test coverage on different levels and shares examples of the tooling they used to achieve that.

Boris Cherkasky uses quite an amusing rating system to show how bad some of the common test automation anti-patterns are.

In relation to that, Enes Kühn describes the API testing challenges: valid negative scenarios.

Vitest is one of the latest test frameworks for the JavaScript ecosystem, and Andrey Enin explains how to leverage its features for API testing.

As mentioned last week, Playwright has released a new version with a cool feature for generating assertions. Here's another take on that by Butch Mayhew.

I must admit I haven't heard of Bazel before, but this article by Umama Nasir Abbasi got my attention on how it can help with test automation.

Whether you use Appium or Selenium for testing, you may need to implement some custom waiting functionality. Lana Begunova explains different ways of achieving that.

If you're looking for motivation, Kristel Kruustük explains how important it is to practice purposeful testing in this 35-minute video.

Cypress has recently added an experimental feature for configuring test retries, and Jarad Saunders explains how it works.

"Tester has joined the project..." 🤣

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