Welcome to the 36th issue!

I truly believe that software tester's role is continuously evolving and we need to keep learning new skills to stay relevant in our field.

Inspired by Marie's article (see below), I noticed that one of the great ways to do it is by taking up one of the 30 Days of Testing challenges from Ministry of Testing.

So if you're planning on starting one, let me know on Twitter or LinkedIn as I'll be happy to follow your journey.

Until next week!

Dawid Dylowicz

If you're not very familiar with accessibility testing, this summary of Marie Drake's first 15 days of accessibility testing challenge is a great place to start.

In this great guide, Johanna South explains everything about exploratory testing and shows how to test and have fun at the same time. I especially liked the role-playing part!

You might have noticed that we work in an agile-everything environment nowadays and Kinga Witko shares her thoughts on this movement and what implications it has for us and the companies we work for.

There's a lot to learn from this comprehensive overview of various software testing metrics by Andrey Ostapenko where he describes what type of metrics can be used and how they can be measured using various formulas and analytics.

To make things clear, many soft skills play a huge role, but I agree with Andrejs Doronins that the one he describes here is crucial for software testers. One will not get far without it, for sure.

PS. If you can't access the full article, simply open the link in a private tab.

Dennis Martinez gives some solid practical advice on how to avoid the three common mistakes in test automation. Better safe than sorry!

I liked this story by Marek Siemieniuk-Morawski about choosing Cucumber for his first test automation project and what he learned from that.

In this high-level overview, Vlad Ershov shows a step-by-step journey of choosing the right test automation strategy, including information on what to do and what tools you can potentially use.

Wouldn't it be great to have auto-generated API tests?! It might be possible now with the open-source tool called CATs that Madalin Ilie describes in this article. All you need is to define your API using the OpenAPI specification. I really like the idea!

Bas Dijkstra explains why and how you can make your test framework easier to use by implementing a custom Domain Specific Language. The examples, the pros and cons and the idea behind it are all well explained in there.

PS. If you can't access the full article, simply open the link in a private tab.

Reece Harbour has recently released a tool for recording test steps in Chrome and Firefox. It looks promising as it may be an interesting alternative to Selenium IDE.

SeleniumBase is an open-source Selenium wrapper for Python with features such as automated spinning up of browsers, screenshots on failure and advanced test reports.

If you're planning on trying it out, you might be interested in Pablo Calvo's concept of test automation framework architecture with SeleniumBase.

If it works, it works. 😂