Issue 272

COMMENT

Welcome to the 272nd issue!

There's a race not only among the commercial AI-powered testing solutions.

The open-source landscape is buzzing too.

How? Well, here's The State of Open-Source AI-Powered Test Automation.

Alex Rodionov shows examples of various tools, categorised as test generators, test runners and test libraries, such as LaVague, Shortest and Alumnium.

Interesting times! 🙂

NEWS

Accessibility Testing for Mobile Apps: Are You Missing These Critical Checks?

With the new regulation coming to Europe, testing for accessibility is becoming increasingly important. So it's great to see practical advice from Mona M. Abd El-Rahman on how to do that on mobile.

Moreover, Michael Kennedy shares several Empathy lessons for software testers: Preparing for the European Accessibility Act.

AI and Deterministic Testing

Testing the way we've always known it might not apply to AI-based apps. Dick Dowdell describes in detail why and explains how to approach it instead.

Also, there's a good reminder from Sarat Ramineni that Testing isn't dead. It got smarter.

Being a Solo QA with Daily Deployments: How to Survive and Still Build a Quality Process

Following last week's article, Jyan Swan shared another interesting point of view on what it is like to be a sole tester in a team.

Furthermore, İlay İnan Ünal has some good insights into Dancing with Requirements: The QA Engineer's Hidden Superpower.

How to Report Quality Metrics to Top Management (Without Putting Them to Sleep)

It's hard to set good quality metrics, and so is making them relevant and visible. But Ivan Boklach has some good tips on that.

Let's Rethink the Role of QA — It's Not About Owning Quality

Xinyu Zhang makes some good points about a tester's evolving role in modern software development and proposes to lean towards Integration Assurance instead.

AUTOMATION

Behind the Green Check: A Guide to Test Doubles

Wondering how test doubles — such as mocks, stubs and fakes — can help you in testing? Puti Raissa put together a comprehensive guide.

Also, Shubham Sharma explains why Mocking Dependencies in Your E2E Tests is Key to Effective E2E Testing.

How Component-Based Testing Can Future-Proof Your Enterprise UI and API Automation

You've probably heard about the Page Object Model. But what if we broke down pages into components? Kavita Jadhav explains this approach and its advantages.

Furthermore, Jack Bentley shows examples of Creating a Page Object Model in Cypress.

How do I transition from manual testing to automation?

If you want to learn test automation but are unsure where to start — you're not alone. Someone asked this question on Reddit and got some good advice from the testing community.

Test-Driven Development: The Key to Building Reliable and Scalable Software

And if you wonder what Test-Driven Development is about, Muhammad Hilal Darul Fauzan has put together a comprehensive guide with examples.

The Testing Tower

We've heard about many test shapes describing test strategy so far: pyramids, honeycombs, trophies... but what about a tower? Jose Maria Flores Zazo shows an interesting point of view.

TOOLS

Can tools really "simulate user behaviour"?

Michael Bolton shared a very good point on what it takes to properly test our apps from the user's perspective and why tools such as Selenium, Cypress, and Playwright might not fully do that for us.

Lesser known strengths of Playwright

Playwright has a lot of great built-in features, but do you know about them? Anjali Kulkarni describes some of the powerful, but not necessarily the most obvious ones.

And if you want to test how your web app performs when offline, Irfan Mujagić wrote a helpful guide to Testing Cached Data with Playwright.

UI Test Automation Beginner's Guide: Selenium IDE & XPath Without Coding

Want to start with testing using Selenium? Danyil Antoniuk put together a multiple-part guide to setting it up and running it. You can also read the second and third parts.

VIDEOS

Playwright.NET now Supports XUnit — Officially!

One of the main advantages of Playwright is that we can use different languages to implement the tests. For those of you preferring C# and .NET environment, Karthik K.K. highlights the recent official support for XUnit.

Remote Working Software Testing Challenges

While remote work is becoming more common than ever, it's important to know its benefits and challenges, especially in software testing. Daniel Knott explains this in a 14-minute video.

AND...

Well, good news… 😂

Thanks for reading!

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Issue 272 May 26th 2025