Welcome to the 30th issue of Software Testing Weekly!

I listened to this very interesting podcast about VW's software "bug" (or rather a sinister feature) that cost the company a whopping $33bn. What I found even more interesting is how a group of testers discovered the problem. Moreover, I was really impressed by how well prepared the episode was by Pete Houghton. I feel like I'll become a more frequent listener!

PS. I'm very excited to announce that I've decided to be transparent about running Software Testing Weekly, sharing the story of growing this project as I go. You can follow my updates on IndieHackers platform and I'll be soon releasing a blog post about what I've learned so far. Hope you'll enjoy it! 😊

Dawid Dylowicz

What a read! Charisma Chan and Beth Cooper share lots, lots of insights on how Google is debugging production issues and tips on how we can apply these strategies in our projects.

In another brilliant post of the series, Michael Bolton continues to explain why the number of test cases is not a good metric for measuring quality.

Hungry for more? There's already the next part on why it's so hard to tell when testing will be done.

This series looks promising! Maaike Brinkhof has spent 10 years in testing and decided to share 10 lessons she learned during that time. In the article above, you can read her first lesson about testing alone not doing... much.

A super insightful read from Ladislav Cicon and Jyoti Patel on how they used a smart exploratory testing approach to test a project as a whole, while not running out of time nor budget.

Having been a QA Lead, I know how important it is to embed a culture of quality into the organisation. That's why I really enjoyed Simon Prior's take on the matter — so well explained and full of solid pieces of advice.

A great in-depth article by Andrew Knight who shares his experience of mentoring software testers, explaining why it's important and how to do it well from the mentor's and the mentee's perspectives.

Bruno Oliveira explains why there's no ideal test automation pyramid to follow and gives a piece of advice on how you should adapt your strategy according to the test architecture instead.

A really deep dive into how Cypress can be used for testing React applications by Artem Sapegin. Loved the rich-in-code examples!

Elias Nogueira shares several ways that you can use to generate test data for automated tests, explaining it very simply with examples.

Cucumber on top of REST-Assured API framework? No problem, Amir Ghahrai shows step by step how to set up and run such tests!

Alan Richardson created a cool platform for anyone who wants to practice API testing skills by doing small challenges. As of now, there's more than 30 of them and you can get started here.

Agustin Romano put together a pretty impressive list covering over 50 tools that any DevOps can use. Handy if you want to catch-up on what's going on in that space.

A nice list of 10 well-described automation tools recommended by Jason Boog. Plus you'll find another 15 tools mentioned at the end of the article.

Looking for a read on performance testing? Check out Kristin Jackvony's great review of a book titled Performance Testing — A Practical Guide and Approach.

One of the most insightful presentations I've seen in a while — worth watching every minute of it. I can totally relate to what Titus Fortner is saying about Behaviour-Driven Development tools, especially when they can be used and when they should be avoided. Very well done!

Fixing bugs during a live demo... 😂