Issue 51

COMMENT

Merry Christmas! 🎄

I hope you're having a wonderful holiday, free of worries and bugs.

Stay tuned for the next week (that will be next year already!) because I'll share with you a special edition of Software Testing Weekly.

See you in 2021! 😊

PS. This is the last chance to get your business article, service or product featured as a sponsored link at the current price of just $59 per issue. The audience has grown by hundreds over the past months and the price will go up on 1st Jan 2021 to reflect this growth. There are just a few slots left, so book now!

NEWS

Top 10 Most Popular Free Test Automation Courses of 2020

The holiday season is a great time to start learning new things and here's a list of the most popular courses from Test Automation University, curated by Angie Jones. Best yet, they're all free!

Applying Session Based Exploratory Testing to Gaming Bring Them On!

I don't know much about testing games but I like the way Diego Marin explains the exploratory testing approach to the game mechanics. It shows a new perspective of testing other types of software.

Inefficient QA processes

I liked Vineeth Venudasan points on why manual QA processes are inefficient, how shifting-left with test automation can help it and why the full end-to-end UI automation is not the real remedy.

Is it possible to be actual friends with developers whose code you test?

This question on Reddit got my attention, and the replies have some great pieces of advice on how to improve the QA-Dev relationship.

Step by step guide: Testing without requirements

It's hard to test when there are no requirements but this guide by Nicola Lindgren has some good tips on how to navigate testing in such a situation.

The New Role Of The Software Quality Architect

Not only do they ensure critical bugs are found before we release our products, but they also help the whole organization understand the value we are generating for our customers so that we can invest in the areas where we increase this value.

Here's an interesting view on the evolving tester's role by Joel Montvelisky.

AUTOMATION

Don't use getByTestId

Jacques Blom explains why using getByRole instead of getByTestId in React application tests is better for writing reliable tests and better code. As Jacques says, it allows testing code in the way that it's used, rather than testing how it's written. I found it very insightful.

Design Patterns for High-Quality Automated Tests: Fluent API

In this useful guide, Anton Angelov shows how to use the Fluent Interface design pattern in tests code.

Understanding the Robot Pattern for UI tests.

I liked this two-part guide to using a Robot pattern in UI tests by Little Coder Girl.

And if you want to see it in action, make sure to check out the just-published second part about using the pattern in Android tests with Espresso.

Writing clean Cypress tests

I'm a huge fan of treating test code as production code and keeping it clean (i.e readable and reusable). Here's a good example describing testing in Cypress by Klaidas Lekavičius.

TOOLS

Importance of Selecting Right Automation Testing Tool

Franco Santi wrote a set of decent pieces of advice on the process of choosing the best tool for the testing job.

Practical guide to perform visual testing in CodeceptJS

Vitalii Sotnichenko shows how to integrate CodeceptJS — an open-source solution for end-to-end testing — with popular tools for visual testing.

BOOKS

The Best Testing Book I Know is Not Written in English

This is about a software testing book written by Xiaomei Tai that I sadly cannot read, too. But what I enjoyed the most is the very interesting story behind it that James Bach brought up here.

The Best Software Architecture Books of All Time

If you want to improve your code architecture skills (which are useful for creating test automation frameworks), then this big list of books on the subject by Thilina Ashen Gamage may come in handy.

AND...

And then they ask us to test it... 😅