Welcome to the 223rd issue!

Do you know the 5th Modern Testing Principle?

This is the lesson that Sonos — the maker of premium connected audio equipment — is learning the hard way.

Let me tell you the story.

A month ago, they released a completely redesigned mobile app.

An app that's been the heart of their system, orchestrating hardware connection and music playback.

And they messed up. Big time!

How? This article summarises it best.

In short, it had critical issues, missed core functionality and made it unusable to visually impaired people.

So, understandably, their customers got very angry.

Just look at this Reddit megathread and posts on X.

Now, a month has passed and Sonos has addressed some of the issues. They even shared a public roadmap.

And I'm sure they'll get it right, eventually.

But it's the trust, reputation and perception of quality that will be much harder to regain.

So with that lesson in mind...

Happy testing! 🙂

Dawid Dylowicz

Wondering what's the difference between being the first tester in an organisation, being the only tester on a team, and working at large enterprises? Avinash Vishwakumar shares his experience.

However, is it true that QA demand is not there anymore? Here's what people observe.

There's some great advice by Callum Akehurst-Ryan on what to look for when you want to hire an experienced tester for your team.

Additionally, Pedro Catré shares some interesting thoughts: How Many QA Devs Does Your Company Need?

If you want to improve your testing skills, Hanisha Arora shares a few valuable tips.

Jamiu Salimon explains well what synthetic monitoring is about and how it can help you find issues in production faster.

This is a great reminder from Lisa Crispin about what metrics are really about. Sometimes it's easy to forget about it.

This is the kind of question that pops up from time to time in the testing community. And for a good reason — it's not straightforward to decide what should be automated and with what priority. Here's what testers suggest.

Joost van Wollingen shares good insights into how they built a custom test data library and what they learned along the way.

And if you're looking for a more practical guide, René Rodríguez Luquin explains how to set up Dynamic Test Data — Testing Good Practices.

Audy Chavarria shows a decent example of integration testing with Kotlin and WireMock.

How should you approach code reviews as a tester? Eleonora Belova shares several great pieces of advice.

Furthermore, Steven Boutcher brings up a number of good reasons why You should be using data-testid.

In the third article of the series, Kristin Jackvony explains the Liskov Substitution Principle and shows an example of using it in test automation projects.

If you're interested in implementing the Behaviour-Driven Development approach in your Cypress tests, Rajesh Yemul shows how to achieve that by integrating Cucumber.

Want to rerun your latest failed Playwright tests? Now it's possible with just one command, as Butch Mayhew explains.

In this straightforward, step-by-step guide, Chandan Kumar demonstrates how to implement POM in Selenium.

You might also be interested in Chandan's examples of Implementing Implicit, Explicit, and Fluent Waits.

Sofia Hrynevych shows how to make the execution of your API tests easier and more manageable with tools such as Newman, Swagger and more.

Need to load test gRPC services? Gaurav Singh demonstrates a detailed solution using Java and Locust.

In just over 6 minutes, Nikolay Advolodkin gives a great overview of examples of good practices in test automation.

In last week's issue, I highlighted an article showing an example of a mobile app test strategy. And this 15-minute overview by Daniel Knott is a great follow up to that.

Bug or a feature...? 😂

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