Issue 212

COMMENT

Welcome to the 212th issue!

Are you concerned about the progress of AI impacting your job?

Fear not, here are some recent optimistic views from the community:

So the common belief is that the tester's role is becoming even more important.

And, if anything, AI will help us test more effectively.

For example, AI is getting fascinating capabilities in navigating mobile apps using vision — you can read more about it in the Tools section below.

Happy testing! 🙂

NEWS

A Commentary on Defining Observability

This is a wonderful thought process from Fred Hebert on observability, which is a crucial part of the modern software development lifecycle from the quality point of view.

Furthermore, Melissa Eaden shares some accurate observations about The Monster Called Technical Debt.

A Guide to Bug Refinement in Software Testing: Streamlining Your Workflow

If your team suffers from a growing bug backlog, Meg MacKay advises organising regular bug refinement sessions.

What may come in especially handy is the right way of Prioritizing Bugs, as described by Brienna Ransom.

How to set up QA processes from scratch?

There's no better way to learn about that than listening to different points of view of the testing community, based on their experience.

Also, another question that many of you might be asking yourselves — Is Setting Up CI/CD Pipelines Part of QA?

Soft skills for QA Engineers

It's no secret that a software tester's role requires technical as well as soft skills. Maria Golubeva describes the key areas worth investing in.

Think About AI Systems Like A Tester

While AI and machine learning-based systems are getting more popular, so is testing of them. Wayne Roseberry gives some great advice on how to approach that.

AUTOMATION

A journey through the Testing Pyramid: why your tests are bad

In this insightful overview, Kris Raven describes how to use the test pyramid in practice.

And in a good follow-up read, Noemi Ferrera advises using The sideways test pyramid in the pipeline.

Developer experience & productivity: The less spoken bottleneck of test automation

"How do you ensure your developers or test automation engineers are happy writing tests?"

Abhijeet Vaikar gives plenty of great advice.

Examples of SOLID Principles in Test Automation

This is a SOLID (😉) overview of principles that can be applied in test automation with examples in C#.

Additionally, Ahmad Sufi shows how to Optimise UI Testing Efficiency with Page Object Model.

How to handle: 5 Issues that Every QA Automation Engineer faces

If you do test automation, chances are you may run into some common problems. Bharat Varshney explains how to overcome them.

Similarly, Olexiy Vovk goes through the Top 5 Mistakes in Automated Testing.

The Hidden Costs of Conditional Testing in UI Automation

Using ifs in your tests? Shyamal Raju explains why it may lead to problems further down the line and advises what to do instead.

Also, Michael Kutz warns about the Tangles in Test Code: Magic Values.

TOOLS

API Penetration Testing: Using ZAP Automation Framework

If you want to practice API security testing, Jaishree Patidar shows practical examples of utilising ZAP.

How to Avoid Flaky Tests in Playwright

Playwright has quite a few features that help reduce test flakiness, but that might not be enough by itself. Antonello Zanini shows what more you can do.

And here's a handy overview of Playwright's auto-wait is simple and superb by Cerosh Jacob.

iOS & OS Agents in the Era of Multi-Modal Generative AI

What if AI could navigate within a mobile app just by "looking" at it? Now it can! Francesco Bonacci created a proof of concept for doing that using GPT-4V(ision) and Appium. This is exciting!

Strategic Tagging: Optimizing Your Playwright Test Suite

Playwright v1.42 introduces a new, more convenient way of tagging tests. Meris Stupar gives a fine overview of that with practical examples.

Similarly, Parthiban Rajasekaran describes The Art of Playwright Tags.

VIDEOS

AI-Assisted Testing: Mark Winteringham

If you'd like to understand how AI can help testers, here's a 42-minute overview by Mark Winteringham and Nikolay Advolodkin.

Cypress Flaky Tests Exercises

How can you solve test flakiness in Cypress? Gleb Bahmutov recorded several short exercises showing how to do it.

AND...

Ah, debugging... 😂

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.

Issue 212 March 24th 2024