Issue 260

COMMENT

Welcome to the 260th issue!

How much testing should developers do?

This time, I want to share with you three recent discussions about it:

For example, one of the Agile testing success factors is the whole-team approach to testing and quality.

So it's very interesting to see different scenarios and what testers think about them.

Happy testing and enjoy the read! 🙂

NEWS

AI for QA: Hype vs Reality

How much can AI impact QA? Igor Goldshmidt highlights the opportunities it brings for optimising testing efforts while doubting it will completely replace us.

Also, How Has AI Transformed Your Daily Workflow as a QA Engineer?

QE Leadership at 3 stages of org, your blueprint for QE Success

Having worked as a Quality Coach with many companies, Millan Kaul shares practical advice on what to focus on at different stages from a quality engineering perspective.

The High Cost of Rushing: Do You Want to Build a Product or Just Put Out Fires?

Rafael Miguel gives us a lot of food for thought and solid reminders about balancing the quality at speed in software development.

Similarly, Callum Akehurst-Ryan correctly observes that Your product is more than just features.

Top 3 Useless Quality Metrics (And What to Measure Instead)

Daria Kotelenets makes several good points about the problem with common quality metrics, such as code coverage or the number of bugs. I must admit I've saved a few quotes from this article!

When the tester's away… the team can test anyway!

How do you prepare a team for the absence of a tester? Emily O'Connor explains that, ideally, you should enable the team to test by themselves via investing in coaching, documentation and testability.

In that context, Marina Jordão points out How Poor Communication is Holding Your QA Culture Back (And How to Fix It).

AUTOMATION

Automatically Testing an LLM: Evaluating Response Quality with Semantic Scores

Wondering how to test LLM-generated output? Jean-Christophe Jamet explains in simple terms a solution based on cosine similarity and ROUGE scores.

How to Write Breakable Tests for Unbreakable Code

Reut has put together many great practical tips on writing good tests. They apply to the unit and other types of tests.

In relation to that, Gil Zilberfeld wrote solid articles about Tests — The Saviors Of Lost Knowledge and The Goal of Unit Testing.

Page Objects vs. Functional Helpers

This is a great, concise overview of the pros and cons of using either test pattern. The discussion in the comments is also worth a read. Thanks, Murat Ozcan.

Similarly, Toufique Ikbal shows examples of Key Design Patterns & Best Practices in Test Automation.

Practical Applications of AI in Test Automation — Context, UI-Tars LLM , Midscene (Part 1)

How can we practically use AI in test automation? It's a question that's been on top of many testers' minds. Here's an interesting example of research done by Zhaopeng Xuan. You can also read the part 2 and part 3.

TOOLS

A Simple Guide to JUnit: Everything You Need to Know

Using Java for testing? Er. Prithu Kathet wrote a practical overview of JUnit— one of the most popular open-source test runners in that ecosystem.

Announcing Cypress Support for Firefox over WebDriver BiDi

More news from Cypress — the 14.1.0 version brings support to WebDriver BiDi for Firefox, replacing the deprecated CDP approach. Jennifer Shehane tells us more about it.

Mastering Playwright Test Automation: From Flaky Tests to Confident Deployments

Parthiban Rajasekaran shares plenty of lessons learned from working with Playwright that will help you improve the reliability of your tests.

Moreover, Juan Promanzio gives advice on Avoiding Collisions and Failures in Parallel Testing, while Debbie O'Brien shows a few tips on Reproducing CI Failures Locally in Playwright.

Why I Prefer Ruby As E2E Test Automation Scripting Language?

There are many opinions and preferences regarding which programming languages are best for test automation. Here's one from Courtney Zhan about Ruby, followed by the second part.

BOOKS

Lessons from The Clean Coder

The Clean Coder is a book with tons of advice for all software engineers, including testers. Tyler Hawkins summarised the key lessons learned from it.

VIDEOS

Testing Demoes: Watch Testing in Action

Curious about how testers actually... test? Rahul Parwal put together a collection of recordings of live testing sessions, including exploratory testing and test automation.

Typical day of Junior Tester and common QA responsibilities

If you're just starting your software testing journey, you may wonder what the entry-level job looks like in practice. Alex Khvastovich gives a helpful overview.

AND...

Pride versioning... 😂

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.

Issue 260 March 5th 2025