Issue 299

COMMENT

Welcome to the 299th issue!

Today, I have a great resource to share with you — 100 Insights into Quality Engineering.

It's a series of short notes compiled by Jitesh Gosai from various sources in 2025.

And based on that, Jitesh described the Three Quality Engineering challenges of 2025, and what to do about them in 2026.

Enjoy and happy testing! 🙂

NEWS

How to Train Your QA Team to Embed AI into Daily Work

Whether you're already using or planning to use AI, Marina Jordão gives some great advice for test teams on how to do it right.

On top of that, Yogesh Deshmukh brings up a few interesting points on Why You Can't Use AI for Testing Until You Know How to Test AI.

Rethinking how we use AI in testing

It's tempting to use AI for testing, but Konstantinos Konstantakopoulos points out that we shouldn't forget to value human judgment and analysis.

Similarly, Nicholas Ofonagoro shares his thoughts about working with AI — Test Automation & AI: ChatGPT… Please Take My Job!.

Software Acceleration and Desynchronization

Fred Hebert shares a wonderful, thought-provoking article about the constant battle to find the right balance between speed and quality in software.

Also, George Ukkuru notices that sometimes QA Keeps Testing Rules Nobody Can Explain.

Testing for Quality, Betting on Value

"Testing exists, in part, to mitigate risk but only by helping people understand the risks that exist. Yet, quality itself often requires reasoned and reasonable risk-taking."

I like Jeff Nyman's take on risk described in this article.

Moreover, Keith Klain explains why Testing Shapes Reality, especially in the age of AI.

The QA Skills That Got You Here Won't Carry You Through 2026

A sobering reminder from Abiola Rasaq that you should constantly try to evolve your testing skills and approaches in order to keep growing in your role.

Also, Stuart Thomas describes how we should perceive our role: Quality Engineers — Who Are Your Customers?.

AUTOMATION

Automation Is Not Quality, And Never Was

Do green pipelines really mean you're safe? Mona M. Abd El-Rahman explains why focusing too much on automation can hide some risks that can be exposed by other ways of testing.

Mona also advises on Designing API Test Coverage for Microservices that focuses on testing the right things.

How QA Mindset Improves DevOps Reliability

Wondering how you can bring more shift-right testing practices to your company? Artur Burov gives examples of chaos engineering, synthetic monitoring, contract testing, and more.

Speaking of DevOps, you may want to learn about The Real Cost of a Slow CI Build from Dennis Martinez's observations.

On getting started with mutation testing

While not common, mutation testing can be a powerful way to verify your tests' resilience and challenge assumptions about your system behaviour. Bas Dijkstra wrote a good high-level overview of that.

Run. Learn. Code. — AI That Writes Your Test

Alper Önal demonstrates how they automated AI-powered test generation using proper practices such as POM, MDC, and DSL.

Furthermore, Beth Marshall describes How I Built an Agentic SDLC Demo with Cursor, MCP Servers, Playwright, GitHub, and Vercel in Under an Hour.

XPath Self-Healing: AI-Powered Automated Test Maintenance for Modern Web Apps

Struggling with failing locators? Akın Sancar and Cansu Gökay share a detailed, example-based story on how they implemented a solution to auto-heal XPath-based locators with AI.

TOOLS

Cypress Dependencies Through A Docker Image

Wondering how to speed up your pipeline? Gleb Bahmutov shows a detailed guide on how to cache dependencies within a Docker image and implement this solution in CI for Cypress.

How to Verify Response Data in Playwright TypeScript

Using Playwright for API testing? Then you might be interested in different ways of checking responses, as advised by Mohammad Faisal Khatri.

Rentgen is not a Postman replacement — it fills the gap Postman never tried to fill

If you're working with APIs, you may like it. Liudas Jankauskas created Rentgen — an open-source test generation and validation tool. You can find out how it works directly in the repository.

VIDEOS

Boost Your Exploratory Testing — One Tool To Rule Them All

If you haven't heard of the popular BugMagnet browser extension yet, in this 8-minute recording, Daniel Knott explains how it can help you test websites.

Will AI Replace Testers? Keith Klain on the Future of QA

David Burns invited Keith Klain for an intriguing, 40-minute discussion about the future of testing in the age of AI.

AND...

Smoke testing... 😂

Thanks for reading!

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Issue 299 January 19th 2026