Issue 296

COMMENT

Welcome to the 296th issue!

This time, I'm sharing with you a Reddit thread that I particularly enjoyed:

New CTO pushes feature testing to Dev while QA owns quality outcomes.

It sparked an intriguing discussion on shift-left testing, potential quality risks, and lessons learned from this approach taken in other companies.

I believe this is generally the right direction, but it requires careful implementation and support on both the development and testing sides to make it work.

So that's why I also recommend reading A developer's guide to caring for software testers by Olly Fairhall.

Happy testing! 🙂

NEWS

How to Build a QA Team Engineers Actually Want to Work With

David Ingraham shares great advice on building the right culture within a QA team that can effectively support the organisation.

Furthermore, Alan Page correctly outlines why Leadership is a Constant Experiment.

How We Organized Our Dev–QA–PO Pipeline

What workflow pipeline do you use in your team? Anton Faibyshev describes in detail the approach they took to improve collaboration and quality delivery.

At the same time, Higor Mesquita advises on How to Deal with Stressful Deadlines as a QA.

Testing types — beyond definitions

Getting the naming and definitions in testing right is as important as it is hard to achieve. Joep Schuurkes outlines a few reasons why.

Where Have All the QA Gone?

The evolution of AI and the changing market forces have led some companies to believe that cutting testing teams is the way to go. But it isn't without the risks, as Ryan Craven points out.

Perhaps they should listen more to Hannah G. Anulur's thoughts on Redefining QA in the Age of AI and Robert Meaney's reasons leading to The Quality Death Spiral.

Why aren't we talking about Shift Right in Quality Engineering?

Callum Akehurst-Ryan raises some good points about the importance of shift-right testing practices that may not be as popular among the testing community as shift-left ones.

AUTOMATION

Background Coding Agents: Predictable Results Through Strong Feedback Loops (Part 3)

Two weeks ago, I highlighted Spotify's story of creating AI coding agents that autonomously support their development. This is the third (and the most interesting to me) part outlining the challenges in testing that solution by Max Charas and Marc Bruggmann.

Furthermore, Irfan Mujagić shares The Complete Guide to RAG Quality Assurance: Metrics, Testing, and Automation.

Breaking the QA Bottleneck: A Serverless Approach to Automation

Jatinderpal Singh Toor describes how they built an agentic AI solution that generates test documentation in Jira tickets with a single Slack command. Another clever example of leveraging AI to support testing processes.

How We Made Python Pytest Suites 8.5x Faster

Struggling with slow Pytest tests? Anatoly Bobunov explains how parallel runs, better waits, and cleaner data drastically reduced their test execution time.

What's more, Ian Göbl shares great insights into Kota's Method for Reliable Integration Tests.

It's not as bad as you think: Using scorecards in AI testing

Asserting is generally easy — it's either a pass or a fail. However, testing the AI's output is not that straightforward. That's why Gil Zilberfeld developed a scorecard to help determine test outcomes.

Moreover, Oliver Martin-Hirsch shares several high-level Practical Ways to Test AI Across the SDLC.

The Testing Pyramid Is a Mirage Without Tracking

How do you track the test distribution of the test pyramid? Taras Mankovski points out why it's important to understand which tests are implemented at each layer.

Also, Senura Fernando points out why Architecture Tests Are the Missing Layer in Automation.

TOOLS

Appium Camera Automation: Using Virtual Scene Images Step-by-Step

If you need to test Android app flows that use the camera, Khaled Sayed Ramadan demonstrates a simple script that places a custom image in the preview during automation.

What's more, Josphine Job demonstrates How I Fixed Slow Appium Tests with Single-Session Management.

How My Chrome Extension Turbocharges Selenium & Playwright

Facing flaky web UI tests because of the bot detection? Sit comfortably and enjoy this long but insightful guide on how Toni Maxx built an automated solution to address this problem.

How to Build a Full API Automation Framework Inside Playwright (Enterprise-Level Design)

Guna Shekar R gives some great, practical tips for building a Playwright-based API test framework that's well-designed, stable and effective at once.

Use TypeScript branded types in your Cypress tests

Gleb Bahmutov demonstrates how a TypeScript feature can help you write more resilient tests. The example is in Cypress, but it applies to other frameworks, too.

Moreover, Anuradha Liyanage wrote a handy guide to Mastering Cypress Network Requests & API Testing.

Why We Chose XCUITest Over Cross-Platform Tools for iOS Automation

XCUITest is the native test framework for iOS mobile test automation. Josphine Job tells us about the benefits of using it and what lessons they learned along the way, followed by 7 Proven Patterns for Maintainable XCUITest Suites.

VIDEOS

What Testing Tools Do Companies Actually Use? I Found Out

In this 10-minute video, Karthik K.K. comes to a conclusion on the popularity of test automation tools based on various data points. Are you surprised by the results?

AND...

Automatic bug fixing... 😂

Thanks for reading!

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Issue 296 December 17th 2025