Welcome to the 267th issue!

Are you at the beginning of your software testing journey?

Today, I want to share with you some good advice for advancing your career:

• How to Start a Career in Software Testing (Even Without a Tech Background) by Mona M. Abd El-Rahman
• Quality Levelling Up: Career Tips They Don't Teach You by Aya Akl
• And a consoling story of someone who Didn't finish a single QA course, no certs, no GitHub. Got accepted.

Enjoy and happy testing! 🙂

Dawid Dylowicz

There's no denying that we should use AI responsibly. But we should also trust and test it responsibly, as Michal Migda rightly points out.

That's also why Rahul Parwal calls for having The fine print of using AI tools in testing.

It's been a great series by Michael Bolton so far, and I particularly liked this part about the importance of having someone in a testing role who can bring a different perspective.

Also, Michael shares a good reminder that You Can't Inspect Quality Into a Product.

Nowadays, the tester's role is not only about checking things. There's more to that, and İlay İnan Ünal explains it well in this high-level overview.

Just last week, I featured a thought-provoking article on the problem with manual testing, and here's a decent follow-up by Brijesh Deb.

Furthermore, Nikunj Trivedi points out that Automation Engineers Are Not Testers.

What does shift-left testing mean to you? That's a good reminder by Jitesh Gosai on why having a common understanding and commitment is important to make it work.

Mutation testing is about changing the code and seeing if the tests associated with that code fail. But what if we "mutated" the test assertion instead? This is what Leonardo Lanni proposes here.

Furthermore, Eduard Dubilyer shares a few practical examples of Flaky Tests Are Lying to You: How We Help Clients Build Stable Automation.

Atik Naikwade put together a pragmatic guide with a roadmap that can help you stay focused on the right things to learn test automation effectively.

Also, you can find out How to contribute to open-source projects as a software tester by following Ima-Abasi Effiong's advice.

Do you test APIs the right way? Gil Zilberfeld points out that we should test the feature behaviour via API, rather than only verify the API's endpoint output.

There's some great advice from Katya Pereverzeva on how to make your test implementation better. This is followed by the second part.

It seems like a new MCP solution is created every day. Joe Colantonio lists five interesting ones for test automation.

Wondering why? Sanjeev Kumar sheds some light on How MCP Is Transforming the Future of Software Testing.

One of the main advantages of Playwright is that it can be used with various languages. If Java is your pick, then you might be interested in Playwright Java Accelerator — a test framework scaffolding created by Yashwant Das.

NaveenKumar Namachivayam has just announced Feather Wand Agent — a new, open-source, all-in-one AI-powered tool for performance testing that supports popular solutions such as Gatling, JMeter, k6 and Locust.

Visual testing might be sensitive when run on various operating systems. Andrey Enin shows how to avoid that problem by running Playwright screenshot tests in a Docker container.

Also, Yogita Lad explains the three use cases after Diving into Screenshots with Playwright.

It's not a coincidence that both tools are often compared. Pranav S P shares his experience and explains the final choice they made for API testing.

You can also learn about Kishor Munot's thoughts on Cypress updates after 14.0.

Yet another MCP solution! This time, it's the official GitHub MCP server that Joan Esquivel Montero showcases in this 13-minute video.

Also, Karthik K.K. demonstrates This New Database MCP Server is INSANE! Query SQL with Just ENGLISH.

The API key... 😂

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