Welcome to the 247th issue!

Today, I'd like to highlight a fantastic set of QA Job Hunting Resources.

It's a framework to prepare for job interviews in a structured way, including:

• organising your QA knowledge,
• preparing for potential questions,
• showcasing a testing project,
• advice on creating a resume.

Big thanks to Milan Vojnovic for putting this together.

Happy testing! 🙂

Dawid Dylowicz

Risk analysis is one of the essential skills for testers and Andrew January shares a thorough guide to it.

Moreover, Fred Hebert concludes that Local Optimizations Don't Lead to Global Optimums. Well worth the (long) read.

Want to learn advice from experienced and renowned testers? Nicola Lindgren summarises some great insights from interviews.

If you find yourself in a situation similar to the author of this post, check out what other testers advise. Meanwhile, in another discussion: How do you handle difficult developers?

All that brings me to suggest you to read Stuart Thomas's take on Quality engineer: What's in a job title?.

It hasn't been a good tech market for the past two years. If you're one of those impacted by it, Filip Hric has some good advice.

And there are more insights in this Reddit post — Manual QA, about to be laid off. Next steps?

Having shared about the 10th DORA report in the previous issue, it's good timing for this article by Katja Obring.

And so is for this one about DORA Report 2024: Three Ideas to Tackle the Cons of Platform Usage by Areti Panou.

Isn't it true? But beware, there are two opposite sides to it, as Maaike Brinkhof neatly explains.

Furthermore, Elena Voevodkina shares good advice on How to Survive the Stress of Testing (With a Sense of Humor).

Chamila Ambahera demonstrates how to use soft assertions to get more information from your test failures.

It's always a dilemma, isn't it? Millan Kaul describes the characteristics of different combinations.

However, Valentin Lutchanka built an open-source Test Automation ROI Calculator that can help you with that.

If you wonder how to approach testing infrastructure, Johan Veenstra wrote a fine overview with examples based on Terraform.

Looking for a practical example of implementing a test pyramid? Mohamed Mayallo shows that using Node.js, Jest and Puppeteer.

Speaking of which, Nikolai Nobadi explains The Foundations of Effective Testing using... a lasagna metaphor!

The browser is the tester's friend when testing web apps. Irfan Mujagić provides an overview of several features of Chrome DevTools that can help with this.

Kushal Bhalaik has been writing a great, detailed guide on setting up performance tests in k6 from scratch. Here you can find six consecutive parts about configuration, assertions, logging and more.

What if you had to pay for every single test you execute? Maaret Pyhäjärvi shares her story of using an open-source AI tool Hercules for exploratory testing.

Benjamin Bischoff wrote a very interesting article on the dilemmas and biases we often face when choosing new tools.

It also relates to this discussion: Will Selenium become obsolete in the future?

Thananjayan Rajasekaran continues the series of dealing with challenging parts of web automation using Playwright.

Additionally, Meris Stupar demonstrates how to Achieve WCAG Standard with Playwright Accessibility Tests using Axe.

Automating mobile apps? Ahmad Azeri Chandra Bhuana wrote a handy guide on how to do that with WebdriverIO on Android. And he wrote one for iOS, too.

Continuing an insightful series of book reviews, this time Nicola Lindgren wrote about a recent book called Holistic Testing by Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin.

Daniel Knott gives a short overview of several web apps that testers can use to practice their skills, such as exploratory, automation and security testing.

Bug empathy... 😂

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