Welcome to the 232nd issue!

This week, I found a big discussion in the testing community:

Is it still worth to become a QA Engineer in 2024?

It's a valid question given the tougher job market and the tech layoffs over the past two years.

There are different opinions, but most people agree this role has and will be crucial to the success of tech companies. I'm on that side as well.

The outages such as CrowdStrike may further amplify that.

And, in the age of AI, the skills and expertise that testers have may become even more important.

That's both in terms of automation and tool building, as well as exploratory testing and critical thinking ability.

So, happy testing! 🙂

Dawid Dylowicz

Want to learn how to use AI for testing? Rahul Parwal created a page with a lot of links to helpful resources.

Also, Lisa Crispin shared her GenAI/LLM learning journey in relation to testing.

Kostiantyn Teltov gives a detailed overview of creating a one-page test plan, including examples.

QA practices might sometimes be seen as bottleneck to the project's delivery. Vitaly Sharovatov explains why it's not true.

Similarly, Jesper Ottosen has a good point that To go fast — Go slow.

In the previous issues, I've shared testers' opinions on the CrowdStrike outage. And today, I'd also like to highlight this amazing overview by Gergely Orosz.

Moreover, Geoff Cooney shares A Quality Metrics View of the CrowdStrike Outage based on mabl's data.

And finally, CrowdStrike has just released The Final Root Cause Analysis, explaining all the technical details.

Cassandra H. Leung outlines the important actions that great testers do. Also, wondering How to Stand Out as an SDET?

While it's probably not something that most of you would do in your daily jobs, I really enjoyed going through this detailed story by Alexander Zakharenko about testing a Kotlin compiler.

In relation to that, Victor Ronin highlights the challenge with the Ocean of permutations… And why testing is so hard.

Local storage is an important part of web browsers that you can leverage for test automation. Irkham Agung Karunia explains how.

In the last part of the series, Kristin Jackvony uses an example to demonstrate how to apply the Dependency Inversion Principle in automated tests.

In this example-driven article, Krzysztof Piotrowski explains the importance of testing and refactoring and how that contributes to money saving.

Similarly, Gil Zilberfeld explains why poor code design may lead to Fragile Tests.

Curious about using Cucumber in Kotlin tests? Ajeeb Bin Hamid wrote a comprehensive guide on how to implement it step by step.

Also, here's what the community advises in case you're Struggling to understand how BDD testing works.

Anastasia Saltou describes several use cases of GitHub Copilot that can assist testers in their day-to-day jobs.

If you write tests in Playwright for advanced test automation, Thananjayan Rajasekaran shows some of the less-known features it provides.

Some of you willing to start a journey in test automation may wonder what is a good tech stack to learn. Here's what the testing community recommends.

There are some handy things you can do with parameters in JUnit 5, as Anji Boddupally demonstrates. They can also be used to handle Repeated Tests in JUnit5.

Inspired by the Liminal Thinking book, Brienna Ransom points out how its concepts can relate to testing activities.

The Reddit community gave several good book recommendations that can help you become a better tester.

Wondering how remote salaries are established? And which testing roles are in higher demand? Daniel Knott shares a lot of insights into this topic.

If you want to learn test automation from scratch, Karthik K.K started a wonderful series of videos on using Selenium in Java.

Speaking of that, Priyanshu Shekhar shows an example of How to Wait For API Response in Selenium WebDriver 4.

A skilled tester... 😂

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