Welcome to the 295th issue!

Today, I want to share with you something special:

Great Resources on Software Testing & Quality Engineering.

It's a huge, curated collection of testing knowledge — from fundamentals and approaches to automation and tools.

Kudos to Huib Schoots for putting this together.

Happy learning! 🙂

Dawid Dylowicz

The value of the Quality Team is sometimes hard to prove until things go wrong. I could relate to some reflections shared by a fellow leader in this Reddit thread.

Furthermore, Swathika Visagn shares her experience with Exploring test leadership in a consultancy environment.

That's another Reddit thread that got my attention. A genuine question on to what degree software should approach verification of pull requests, with some good advice from the community.

Moreover, Josphine Job points out Why Software Bugs Go Unreported in Testing and How to Fix the Gap.

A full-of-advice article by Maksim Laptev on their journey of creating a foundation for testers to thrive at work, from effective onboarding to avoiding burnout.

In relation to that, I found an insightful article on QA approaches in hiring by Vitaly Sharovatov.

Great take by Alan Page describing how real quality comes from care and a system that supports clarity, flow, and feedback.

Similarly, Jitesh Gosai explains why Quality is Emergent, and Dennis Martinez points out that Everything is a Trade-off in today's software development powered by AI.

Effective testing is mostly about thinking, and that especially applies to developing a good test strategy, as Irfan Mujagić explains.

Moreover, Oliver Martin-Hirsch shares some interesting thoughts on Why QA Will Be the Last Job Standing in the Age of AI.

Miguel Acosta Quinones describes how visual UI tests fit within the test pyramid and let developers catch bugs early.

Josphine Job shows how you can code tests in a descriptive way without an additional layer on top — an approach that was also brought up in a recent Reddit thread about writing BDD with tests without Gherkin.

On the other hand, Çağrı Ataseven demonstrates Building Truly Dynamic Cucumber Step Definitions Using Reflection, Annotations, and Factory Pattern.

Having proven popular in the previous issue, Nai-Yuan Chang continues the series about the Declarative Action Architecture in test automation.

You can also learn Why the DAA Action Layer is More Like an SDK Than a Bag of Tools and explore a handy FAQ.

How do you test LLM-based apps? Leonardo Lanni came up with a neat solution that lets you write simple assertions that leverage another AI underneath to evaluate the output.

Speaking of that, Carlos Gutierrez tells us about the Soft Assertions in the SDET World.

Vladimir Josifoski gives an overview of common mistakes when automating tests and advises what to do instead.

In that context, Taras Mankovski shares a practical solution to Stop abusing test doubles.

Wondering how to use MCP for test automation? Ashwin M provides a step-by-step guide to leveraging agents for executing Playwright tests with file and shell access.

Furthermore, Aykut Denizci shows how to Configure Playwright MCP Like a Pro: Custom Headers, Cookies, and Smarter Agents.

Filip Hric describes an interesting idea on using Playwright MCP and Goose to automate some of the tester's mundane tasks and increase efficiency.

Similarly, Esra Tarakci shares How We Used MCP to Scale Mutation Testing at Trendyol.

Want to migrate to Playwright without too much effort? Aneeshia Sasidharan shares an unconventional way of reusing the existing Cypress page objects directly in Playwright.

Mohammad Faisal Khatri gives detailed advice on how to effectively assert responses in Java tests with REST-assured.

On top of that, Piotr Horzycki demonstrates How to quickly test an API with snapshot tests.

"Outages as a Service"... 😂

Thanks for reading!

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Dawid Dylowicz