Welcome to the 226th issue!

Preparing for a QA interview?

This week, I found something special — Big tech interview questions for QA.

It's a repository of 200+ real questions from companies such as Amazon, Google, IBM and Oracle that you can use to practice and learn.

Thanks to Alex Muradov and other contributors for collecting that.

Happy testing! 🙂

Dawid Dylowicz

I like bug bashes. They allow the team, and even the company, to come together and test their product. Katerina Presnetsova wrote a great overview of how to organise it, including a handy template.

Well, you can't. But Mirek Długosz gives excellent advice on what to do to maximise your confidence and minimise the risk.

Additionally, Callum Akehurst-Ryan has a point saying that Not having an approach causes problems in your testing.

This is a wonderful series by Steve Semelsberger. I mentioned the first part a month ago and I've enjoyed the second one just as much.

Moreover, Jesper Ottosen wrote a decent piece about Aligning with management on testing.

Manual testing is an easy term, but it's often misunderstood, or at least treated too narrowly. Michael Bolton explains the problem and suggests other, more relevant terms for various types of testing.

Speaking of which, Elena Voevodkina wonders — Will Manual Testers Disappear?

Simon Prior shares some solid, high-level advice on good testing and quality practices for Software-as-a-Service companies.

And it might be even more important because it somehow feels that Good Enough Quality Is Taking a Dip, as Maaret Pyhäjärvi points out.

This is a great explanation and overview of Behaviour-Driven Development, including what it means and how to do it with code examples. Kudos, Fahmi Rahmadani.

Furthermore, Kacper Ciepielewski asks and explains — What exactly is a framework?

To have stable tests that closely replicate your users' behaviour, you need a good test environment. Joe Colantonio explains more about it.

Also, wondering How to reduce automated regression test suite time down?

Curious about the right approach to UI testing? Tally Barak goes through several ways explaining their pros and cons.

Contract testing can be a great addition to the test strategy, especially for systems with a microservices architecture. Krzysztof Przekwas describes how and when to use it.

If you're writing tests with Cypress, you may like these three handy and perhaps not-so-obvious tips on implementing tests by Deep Shah.

And as a bonus tip, here's how to Skip Cypress Tests on First Failure Using AfterEach.

As I mentioned last week, Swift Testing is here. And if you want to learn more about how to get started with it, Pol Piella explains that in detail.

Similarly, Leonardo Santos says Hello Swift Testing, Goodbye XCTest.

We've had some Cypress tips, now it's time for Playwright. Here's a helpful one by Sergei Gapanovich about smarter test retries.

Furthermore, Irfan Mujagić explains how to Handle Unreliable API Endpoints with Custom Retry Logic and Mocking with Playwright.

And if you're using Playwright with JavaScript, it can also help you find errors and exceptions in the console, as Nočnica Mellifera nicely explains.

In this comprehensive guide, Maria Glushchenko shows how to set up and run visual testing with Kaspresso.

There are some valuable lessons that Pramod Dutta has learned in his testing career. And if you prefer to read about it instead, here's a related article.

In this 12-minute video, Alex Khvastovich shares some good analysis of the QA job market in the US compared to 6 months ago. Has it improved? It seems so!

Some bugs are just like that... 😅

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