Welcome to the 298th issue!

Vibium is here! 😳

For those who don't know yet, it's a new AI-powered open-source test automation tool from Jason Huggins — Selenium's creator.

Since the official release announcement, it's already gained support for JavaScript and Python.

While it's still in an early stage and more is coming, it's a huge milestone for the testing community.

Watch this space.

Happy testing in 2026! 🥳

Dawid Dylowicz

In a post announcing a new series of articles, Jeff Nyman explains why testing AI systems means evaluating the whole application, not just models.

Similarly, Keith Klain wrote a thought-provoking article on The Great Liberation — Where Do We Go From Here? in the context of AI.

While AI won't replace testers, it changes how we work. Maksim Laptev shares practical ways to use prompts for analysis, test cases, and automation.

Furthermore, Swathika Visagn explains the importance of The power of human touch in the AI era.

How do you know if a release is truly safe? Ujjwal Kumar Singh suggests an approach focused on judgment rather than checklists for assessing risk before shipping.

Similarly, Higor Mesquita shares a few good points on Why QA Needs to Be Curious About the Product.

Want to improve your testing approach? Hanisha Arora shares how small habits and changing the way of thinking about software helped her.

It may also help you to get better at finding and acting on the Signals in the Noise, as Alan Page points out.

There's some great advice from Robert Meaney on how to introduce effective risk-based test automation.

Additionally, Ricardo Carrasco shares the approach they took for Building a Testing Standard for the Frontlines.

If you also wonder how to properly structure and design your page objects, there's some good discussion among testing professionals in this Reddit thread.

A good point brought up by Gil Zilberfeld on test flakiness. I mean, how often is it the fault of the test script vs the system under test?

This is very much seconded by Ravisuriya Eswara, stating that There Is No Flaky Test! Then, What Is Flaky?

In this concise article, Deepak Naik shares several tips on implementing the test pyramid for web apps.

And if you want to learn more, Shubham Sharma wrote an interesting article about The Integration Testing Spectrum.

Tanvi Mittal describes the two crucial concepts that determine your test automation success. You can read more in part 2 and part 3.

Bas Dijkstra shares a good refresher on test automation fundamentals, with advice on pairing, tools, and maintaining high-quality testing.

At the same time, Joep Schuurkes reminds us what CI/CD is about — Not continuous everything!

If you're looking for a way to track the results of your test automation tests over time, Oleksii Shamrai wrote a detailed guide to setting up a dashboard in Kibana.

Continuing the series of articles, Rajesh Yemul shares several tips on setting up a test automation framework with Playwright.

This is well complemented by Sajith Dilshan's advice on leveraging Playwright Fixtures, as well as Guna Shekar R's overview of creating a Full CRUD Test Suite With Playwright API.

Struggling with failing Cypress tests? Sebastian Clavijo Suero created a handy plugin cypress-flaky-test-audit that gives detailed, per-command analytics for your test runs, including execution order, timing, retries, and test outcomes.

If you're into mobile test automation, you might have heard of Maestro. But how does it really work? Om Narayan did a detailed analysis of its code that reveals some limitations.

Balázs Major shares a practical guide to using TestContainers to run realistic integration tests without complex setups.

Similarly, Alexandre Therrien gives a handy overview of Docker Compose for Integration Testing.

Claude is AGI... 🤣

Thanks for reading!

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Dawid Dylowicz