Welcome to the 199th issue!

This week, I enjoyed a discussion started by this question:

What is the overall goal of test automation?

There's so much focus on test automation that sometimes we may not even ask ourselves the basic question about why we do it.

So enjoy, and happy testing! 🙂

PS. This is the last "normal" issue of the newsletter this year. Stay tuned for a special one coming up next week!

Dawid Dylowicz

Anne-Laure Gaillard shares how they prepared and ran exploratory testing for API and what they learned from that.

What does it mean to be a quality coach? Mirza Šišić describes the role and responsibilities and advises what you can do to become one.

Also, Venkat Ramakrishnan wrote about the naming of Testing Roles.

In this thought-provoking article, Jeff Nyman shares his view on the difference between testing and checking, and explains the meaning of quality.

If you're curious about what teams should do regarding software testing, Dominik Szahidewicz has several good tips.

Anastasia Mordvintseva explains how testing practices may differ from project to project and how you can prepare for different scenarios.

You might also want to explore Isaac Lee's view on Why Testing Accelerates Burnout.

Wondering what types of accessibility tests you should and shouldn't automate? Irfan Mujagić put together a comprehensive guide.

And if you're curious about how to do it on mobile, Sahil Sharma shows how to Set Up Automated Accessibility Audits in Your iOS App CI/CD Pipeline.

Having learned from his test automation experience, Bharat Varshney shares the common problems testers may encounter and suggests solutions for them.

Getting started with testing Android apps? Ryan Wong has got you covered with this helpful, step-by-step guide.

Furthermore, Phil Blenkinsop explains how you can do E2E Testing Android Apps With ADB.

Some people advocate using ChatGPT for test data generation, but Michael Bolton checks whether it's really that reliable.

Butch Mayhew shows a handy way of assessing feature coverage with Playwright — a solution that can be applied to other test frameworks, too.

In relation to that, Maaret Pyhäjärvi tells us about Model-Based Testing in Python.

In the second part of the series, Nikita Belkovskiy compares the feasibility of API test setup and test teardown between Postman and Pytest.

You may also want to discover other Free/Open Source Alternatives to Postman.

If you're looking for a detailed overview of setting up and using Appium for automating mobile apps, have a look at this great guide by Lana Begunova.

You may also want to learn about The Pros and Cons of XPath — Mobile Locator Strategy.

Ben Hammond describes how Playwright features helped them improve their test automation efficiency.

However, you might also want to see How Playwright compares to TestCafe, as Cerosh Jacob explains.

In this overview, Lucy Diaz outlines the pros and cons of using Storybook for visual regression testing of web UI components.

There are plenty of no-code or low-code tools for test automation on the market, and here's what the testing community thinks about them.

Tomasz Gil summarises the key takeaways on test automation from the classic book Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time.

In this great 46-minute recording, Marie Cruz and Nikolay Advolodkin discuss all things performance testing.

If you're looking for an in-depth, practical overview of exploratory testing, Daniel Knott recorded a helpful 30-minute video.

Bug emotions... 😂

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