NEWS
Blending Machine Learning and Hands-on Testing
Machine learning and manual testing? I like this idea! Here James Farrier elaborates on how his team used machine testing to help them point out what the riskiest areas to test are.
Exploratory testing is not just 'clicking around'
Kevin Tuck gives a fine overview of exploratory testing and reminds that it shouldn't be performed in an ad-hoc way. Then, in the second part, he tells us when and how to do it.
How to test when you know a bug won't be fixed
Sometimes it is a bug, not a feature - but it won't be fixed anytime soon. So how should we implement a test around it? Jenny Bramble gives good advice to keep track of such tests by designing the test to fail but implementing it to pass.
3 things that will make or break your project
While not strictly related to software testing, I liked these simple, straightforward and sane rules from Vladimir Khorikov on how to make any coding project a success. Great advice for those of you building a test automation framework, for example.
AUTOMATION
What is API Testing?
Want to learn API testing? Or maybe refresh the basics? Noemi Ferrera published a great tutorial about API Testing, showing around from manual and automation point of view. Concise and insightful!
Contract Testing with Pact.js + GraphQL
Do you write contract tests for your API? If not, you have no excuses not to check out this short but handy article on how to use Pact with GraphQL by Rafaela Azevedo.
How to generate automated test reports using Postman
One more on API testing! If you're using Postman and want to tune your test reports to another level, in this clear guide you'll find out how to use a custom reporter called htmlextra to generate nice-looking HTML reports.
Getting Started with Web UI Automation (Serenity/JS)
This is yet another brilliant 6-part tutorial from Thomas Knee. This time he focused on a JavaScript UI testing framework called Serenity that is based on my favourite Screenplay Pattern. I'm highly recommending to check out all 6 parts here.
Test Your Website's Responsive Design With TestCafe
I've been a fan of TestCafe for a long time mainly due to its flexibility of testing any browser and it's pure-JavaScript nature. Here Dennis Martinez shows how to use the tool to test different mobile screen resolutions, using its built-in support for Chrome's Device Mode and real devices on BrowserStack.
Tips for healthy Page Object classes
Page Object is still the most popular pattern for mapping and encapsulating selectors for UI tests and here Angie Jones shows with examples how to implement one in a neat way.
TOOLS
Introducing Firefox and Edge Support in Cypress 4.0
Big news! Cypress has just released a 4.0 version that finally supports Firefox and... Edge! Great timing, just two weeks after we talked about test automation on the new Edge. Please, give us Safari, too! 🙏
AWS Device Farm supports Selenium
If you are — like me — late to see the news, AWS Device Farm now lets you test your web applications against different desktop versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer browsers that are hosted in the AWS Cloud. It comes with 1000 free minutes which I find quite fair!
COMMENT
Welcome to the 5th issue of Software Testing Weekly! 🙌
This week we've had plenty of great updates — mainly on test automation. But before we move on to them, there's one funny news I want to share with you.
You probably know that there's election season going on in the US. We're in 2020, and obviously, technology is used to help parties connect with voters and get the votes, too. But what if technology fails?
So, what caused the Iowa Democratic Caucus app debacle? Too little software testing, it turns out! And I just love how confident this guy is in this video. Hilarious! 😂
So if you don't want your software to end up like this, check out the great links in this issue and, as always, spread the word on Twitter to help others discover it.
Have a great weekend! 😊
Dawid Dylowicz