Welcome to the 273rd issue!

A few weeks ago, I shared advice on how to start a career in software testing.

Today, I want to highlight a discussion that touches the core of becoming a tester:

You want to be a QA, why?

There are great insights from people who are already working in the field, as well as those who want to break into it.

Happy testing! 🙂

Dawid Dylowicz

How does the tester's role change with career progression? It's more than just the responsibilities. It's also about the way of thinking, as Anthony Mcpherson explains.

Also, Gilles Capdivila shares great insights into Introducing quality in a company that didn't have the culture.

Have you heard of Prospective and Primary Testing? I haven't, and I'm intrigued to learn about both concepts coined by Michael Bolton.

On top of that, Lorin Hochstein explains why The same incident never happens twice, but the patterns recur over and over.

Testing practices and trends have evolved over time. Lee Hawkins gives us good historical context and explains the impact of AI so far.

Moreover, I enjoyed Joep Schuurkes's sobering thoughts on: How essential are your testers?

Mona M. Abd El-Rahman shares some valuable advice on how to be more precise in providing metrics regarding testing and quality. You can read more in the second part — Stop Lying to Yourself: Measure Quality That Impacts Users.

Arun Vishwanathan shares very interesting insights into Test-Driven Development from the perspective of an SDET at Apple.

There has been an increasing number of both low-code and full-code testing solutions. AI seems to be accelerating that trend, and Cassandra H. Leung describes her thoughts on that.

Also, do you feel the AI Implementation pressure in QA as well?

Having a smart, selective test running based on code changes is a great approach for bigger test suites. Gleb Bahmutov shows how to leverage AI to achieve that with Cypress tests.

Moreover, Divya Singla wrote an interesting article about Generating Test Cases from User Behaviour: Is AI Ready?.

If you want to learn about test automation but you don't know where to start, this detailed roadmap by Yingya Wang can help you get started and keep going.

Similarly, someone on Reddit shared a comprehensive Checklist of what to learn for Automation that was praised by the community.

Page Object Model is commonly used in test automation. But as Niraj Subedi explains, there are situations where it might not be the best choice.

Also, here's an interesting discussion — Are well-structured XPaths still considered bad practice?

I liked this clear, logical explanation of test doubles from dummies to mocks by Maicon Jobim and why the latter may make tests less clear.

Also, Muhammad Hilal Darul Fauzan wrote about Mock Objects & Stubs: Your Key to Bulletproof Test Isolation.

Predictably, MCP has arrived on mobile, too! Ismail Sobhy demonstrates a few scenarios of using mobile-mcp to navigate and test mobile apps with AI.

Looking for an API testing client? Erik Milošević listed out 15 possible options ranging from GUI-based to code-based tools.

One of the biggest advantages of RSpec test runner for Ruby is the clear way of describing tests. Ihcène Medjber shows how you can generate a summary of tests without executing them using the --dry-run mode.

Writing tests in TypeScript? Harmeet Singh put together a handy guide on how to implement test decorators that can be used for test tagging, for example.

Speaking of which, Sebastian Attard describes Smarter Cypress Testing with Tags: How @cypress/grep Simplified My Workflow.

Irfan Mujagić explains how to effectively use Chrome DevTools Protocol features in advanced testing with Playwright.

Moreover, Rajesh Sharma presents The .or() Trick in Playwright POM: A QA's Shortcut to Reusable and Cleaner Code.

In this 16-minute video, Joan Esquivel Montero demonstrates pw-api-plugin that enables comprehensive API testing and result presentation using the Playwright UI, Trace Viewer, and HTML Report.

Karthik K.K. briefly shows how to leverage BDD scenarios to create tests with AI.

That went well... 😂

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