Issue 283

COMMENT

Welcome to the 283rd issue!

Last week, we talked about leadership in quality.

Today, I want to highlight another great article from Gary Hawkes — a QA Lead with over 20 years of experience:

6 Leadership Mistakes That Made Me A Better Leader.

It's full of deep insights that apply to both software engineering and software testing areas.

Happy testing! 🙂

NEWS

Lessons in Testing Same-Same, Just Different Projects

There's some great, practical advice from Jesper Ottosen about testing software migration projects, including test scope and integration.

What may also help is Combinatorial Testing: A Weapon in High-Scale Distributed Systems, as explained by Ömer Korkmaz.

QA Engineer in a Product Company: How I Left Outsourcing and Stopped Panicking Before Releases

How is it working for consulting and product companies as a test engineer? Grigorii Sedelnikov shares his perspective and lessons learned after switching to the latter.

Testing AI: lessons from wearing three hats

Testing LLM-based applications is naturally becoming a more desired skill. Avetik Babayan shares what it takes from three perspectives: QA, developer and product manager.

Similarly, Hariprasath V S describes RAGAS — Testing LLM Applications with code examples.

The Reimagined Tester and How to Grow One

Whether you want to help other testers grow or you're a junior tester yourself, Maaret Pyhäjärvi shares the process of mentoring a trainee that helped them acquire automation and exploratory testing skills.

The Three Pillars of QA: Why Testing Alone is Never Enough

Maksim Laptev outlines why QA is more than finding bugs and advises investing in strong processes, documentation, and environments.

Moreover, Arik Aharoni shares some good thoughts on Testing with Empathy: The Missing Skill in QA.

AUTOMATION

Code testing

Taras Kizlo has written a series of detailed articles with examples explaining the approach to each level of the test pyramid. You can read the following parts about:

How to implement self-healing tests with AI

When it comes to using AI in testing, self-healing is often mentioned as one of the key use cases. Here's one way to implement it, according to Shyamal Raju.

How to Know When Simple Isn't Enough Anymore (The TDD Answer)

If you ever wondered about the value of Test-Driven Development, Herbert Moroni Gois wrote a really interesting, example-based article explaining how it helps make code testable.

Furthermore, Ismail Ahmedov Ismailov explains that you can go a step further and Improve test quality with mutation testing.

The Tetris Principle aka "Test as Low as Possible"

Alex Schwartz uses an insightful metaphor to explain why it's beneficial to push tests down the test pyramid.

On top of that, Corina Pip highlights the importance of Adding testing to your test automation.

TOOLS

Cypress-split with Github Actions variables

Cypress doesn't support parallel runs in its open-source version. However, there's a way to achieve it in CI. Ulisses Costa Filho shows an example leveraging GitHub Actions.

Healenium: Making Selenium tests truly self-healing

Heard of Healenium? It's an open-source library that provides self-healing capability to Selenium tests. Chaouki Zemzemi tells us more about it.

Also, Abhishek Verma shares a story of How I Eliminated 80% of Flaky Selenium Tests in a High-Scale QA Environment.

Say Hello to Your New QA Teammate: E2E Test AI Agent

The vision of using AI in testing is very much alive, and there are several approaches to that. Here's an intriguing demo of an AI agent that implements end-to-end tests, presented by Zhaopeng Xuan.

Transforming UI Test Report: Harnessing HAR Files in Playwright

Thananjayan Rajasekaran shows how to get more insights about the API calls during your Playwright UI tests. Pretty cool!

He also shared a quick way to Simplify the Playwright HTML report by using the new describe() method for locators.

BOOKS

VIDEOS

AI-Powered Testing with Alumnium | Playwright + Selenium

Heard of Alumnium? It's an open-source library that brings AI to test automation. In this 12-minute video, Joan Esquivel Montero demonstrates using it to execute Playwright and Selenium tests.

AND...

If software development was a game... 🤣

Thanks for reading!

If you enjoy this newsletter and find it helpful in becoming a better tester, please consider sharing it with others.

Issue 283 September 12th 2025