Issue 56

COMMENT

Welcome to the 56th issue!

I've read Financial growth for people in engineering by Pradeep Soundararajan and I'm happy that he shared it.

You see, we're lucky that tech jobs pay better than other jobs.

Working hard, improving skills and going for better-paid jobs can help us earn even more. But it only works to some degree.

And while this might be enough for most people, it's just one part of the wealth-building formula for engineers.

So what Pradeep wants us to realise is that at some point we should switch from working for money to making money work for us.

It's a great read and I hope it will help some of you.

Happy testing!

NEWS

How to be a user-conscious QA

Here are six great tips by Gareth Thomas on how to perform UX-and-design-related testing in practice, explained with examples.

Tips to Win Your First Test Automation Job

Are you at the beginning of your software testing journey? Dennis Martinez shares a lot of valuable tips that can help you land a test automation job.

And here's a complimentary read about 7 Steps to Find a Job in QA With No Previous Experience by Yoni Flenner.

The Cold Hard Truth About Zero-Defect Software

Zero-defect and zero-bug policies are often implemented in their strictest form. But should they be? Niall Lynch explains why it's more beneficial to focus on improving test coverage rather than aiming for shipping defect-less software.

Testing in Production: Why It’s Part of Any Modern QA Strategy

If you're not familiar with the testing in production practice yet, here's a decent article by Carlos Schults explaining the why, the what and the how.

What Did I Learn From My First Year Working as a Quality Assurance Engineer?

Atul Jha shares with us the six insightful lessons learned after working as a software tester for over a year.

Note: If you can't access the full article, simply open it in a private tab.

AUTOMATION

How to do web performance testing with Google Lighthouse and Cypress

I like Google Lighthouse for its focus on the practical, user-facing part of the performance and it's interesting to see it can be automated within a Cypress test, too. As explained by Marie Drake.

Strategy Design Pattern in Automated Testing Java Code

Here's yet another great example of using a design pattern in test automation by Anton Angelov. Code-heavy!

How much of your E2E testing is automated? Have plans to increase it?

Someone on Reddit wondered how to achieve high end-to-end tests coverage while keeping maintenance under reasonable control. And the comments include some good advice on how to solve that problem.

Why Gherkin (Cucumber, SpecFlow, …) always failed with UI Test automation?

Zhimin Zhan explains why using Cucumber (and other BDD tools) purely as a test tool for automation is the wrong way to go.

BOOKS

21st Century Skills For Testers

This book is about stories that the authors have collected from software testers around the world about their ideas and thoughts on how they apply the 21st-century skills: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.

Emna Ayadi and Ard Kramer have just released a new book for software testers called 21st Century Skills For Testers. It's distributed via LeanPub in the name-your-own-price fashion.

AND...

Still waiting for that fix... 😂

Issue 56 January 29th 2021