Welcome to the 255th issue!

Today, I want to share with you two big news about the popular Behaviour-Driven Development tools.

First, Matt Wynne shared that after five years, Cucumber is back in Community Ownership. This is great news, following the concerns about this popular collaboration tool's future after SmartBear fired its founders two years ago.

At the same time, Tricentis announced the end of life of SpecFlow. This has been quickly picked up by Reqnroll which is aspiring to replace SpecFlow as the go-to BDD solution for C# projects, according to Gáspár Nagy.

It's a good time to remind everyone that tools are just tools and we shouldn't tie our test strategies, or even careers, to specific solutions.

Happy testing! 🙂

Dawid Dylowicz

After a decade of experience in software testing, Andrey Enin collected tons of notes related to API testing. He's now sharing it with us, including the Part 2: Practical Approaches.

Yulia Shaifele describes three different QA metrics and gives advice on what to measure and how to implement them.

However, sometimes no metric will tell you as much as users do. That's why Preethi Warrier wrote about The Secret to Better QA: Think Like a User.

After two years of refining QA processes, Sam Hilsman shares what they came up with in their company.

Furthermore, Dan Beaulieu brings up a few real-life examples to explain why Quality Is Everything in anything we do.

Do you know contract testing? Eleonora Belova has just started a new series of articles describing this type of testing in detail. You can also read the second part which explains Contract Testing: Who's Who in the Process.

A big part of testing is communication. And a big part of communication is the common understanding of terms and definitions. Lisa Crispin explains why this is so important.

Furthermore, Maaike Brinkhof shares some honest thoughts on What if, as a testing community, we’ve been hung up about the wrong thing all this time.

Are your tests on CI getting slower? If so, you can look up what's wrong — just as Jason Aricheta did and described here in great detail.

Also, Anthony Campolo put together a helpful 10-Step Checklist for Continuous Delivery.

If the app you work on uses GraphQL API, this handy guide by Drew Hoover can help you write the right tests for it. This is followed by the second part about Going deep on type-checking mock resolvers for GraphQL test fixtures.

It's always interesting to see how other companies solve their end-to-end testing challenges. Clément Sehan tells a good story about what it took to get faster regression test execution times.

You heard it right. If you blindly take a manual test case and create an automation scenario out of it, that's not optimal. Veith Röthlingshöfer advocates for having a smarter approach.

A great follow-up read is Manish Saini's take on Testing software smarter, not harder: the shift-down strategy.

We often hear that "things were simpler in the past". Vlad Mateica feels the same way about test automation, and he makes some good points on that.

There's a clear difference between unit and UI tests, but do you know how to apply it in practice? Alejandro Rey Juárez shares a few ideas.

On top of that, Gil Zilberfeld describes The Magic of Web Component Tests.

There was a new major release from Cypress and Jennifer Shehane briefly describes the changes it brings. You can also read the migration guide.

Speaking of which, Sam White makes a good point about Cypress and classes — Overqualified!.

Playwright is a modern test framework that allows you not only to test the front-end of the web apps but also the API. Thanasornsawan Varathanamongkolchai shows how in this detailed, step-by-step guide.

Moreover, Steven Boutcher shares some insights into How macOS runners helped me enter the Playwright Matrix.

If your goal is to automate tests that have to use multiple windows, Irfan Mujagić comes to the rescue, explaining the right methods in both Playwright and Cypress.

Struggling with test maintenance? Debbie O'Brien wrote a wonderful article outlining the practical way of structuring and handling your Playwright tests.

Moreover, Butch Mayhew put together a helpful guide on How to Run a Specific Spec File in Playwright Tests Sequentially.

If you work with iOS apps, Thuyen Trinh demonstrates how you can leverage Appium for UI and end-to-end testing.

Speaking of mobile, Stefano Natali introduces us to Mockk: My Favorite Mocking Library for Android.

"Looks Good to Me" is a newly released book about code reviews. Lisa Crispin has already given her opinion on it, highlighting the important parts and emphasising the whole-team approach.

Tyler Hawkins shares his thoughts on A Philosophy of Software Design book that dives into coding styles, documentation and the importance of tests.

In this 17-minute recording, Daniel Knott goes through several freely accessible tools that use machine learning and AI, explaining their benefits for testers.

We don't need unit tests... 😂

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