Welcome to the 61st issue!

We all know that the later we find a bug, the costlier it is to fix. And it's an exponential correlation.

Even though the shift-left approach focuses on preventing bugs, some of them always slip through. And these that do, need to be tackled fast.

So what I found particularly inspiring is how Facebook is finding and fixing regressions faster written by Jian Zhang and Brian Keller.

I like how they use machine learning to choose the best tests to run, allow running them directly in the IDE and automatically signal regressions to the right person. That's some clever stuff.

So I hope you'll find this helpful, too.

Happy testing!

PS. Oh, and there's a job opportunity at the bottom. 😉

Dawid Dylowicz

I've seen many Agile sprints in my career and I found this satiric description by Andrei-Lucian Moraru both amusing and scary because of how accurately it describes some of them. 😄

And since no sprint is ever perfect, here's a useful article on How to keep up with deadlines as a QA engineer? by Delia Stănescu.

I'm a big fan of the Pareto principle. The smaller the team or company I worked for, the more 80/20 patterns I could recognise. And it applies to software testing too, as Prashant Hegde explains.

Magdalena Lozowska listed out questions that you can expect during a software testing interview and gave some great practical tips on how to answer them.

A lot has been written about shifting left but it's hard to find practical advice that you can apply in your day-to-day job. This full of examples guide by Martin Thoma fills in that gap well.

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

When I browse through forums to find news every week, I often see people ranting about software testing and QA roles. So it's nice to see Jason Arbon sharing all the positive side of our jobs, which I fully agree with.

Jonathan Thompson shares some solid lessons he learned on building reliable test automation frameworks.

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

Michał Gacka explains why it's beneficial to write at least one end-to-end test as soon as you start developing a new feature. And I'm particularly happy to see that it comes from a developer.

If you want to add some new tools to your skillset, you may want to check out Beth Marshall's guide on implementing a test automation solution for UI with Selenium 4.0 in C#.

One of the key principles of successful test automation is to run them in an isolated environment. Illia Saveliev shows how to achieve that with Docker on AWS.

Fernando Martín Ortiz shows a great example of how you can test the UI of mobile apps in JavaScript with Appium and WebdriverIO.

Thinking of doing visual testing? Denitsa Kulezich described a handful of paid and free tools for the job that you may want to check.

Abiral Sthapit listed out 65 various tools which helped him in software testing. They vary from simple Chrome Extensions to big commercial tools, so you should easily find something that fits you.

In this nice guide, Dennis Martinez explains why load testing APIs is important and shows how you can do it with Artillery — an open-source tool.

And if you need to do some WebSockets load testing, here's a great guide by Ng Wai Foong describing how to achieve that with another open-source tool — k6.

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

Do you need to test your API or UI with files of various sizes? If so, this repository created by Łukasz Łapaj can give you what you need. It contains a set of images and other files of various sizes, resolutions, formats, names and so on.

In this video, Pramod Dutta describes many project and websites that you can use to practice test automation skills for UI, API and more. And here you can find the full list with links.

When devs and QA play "never have I ever"... 😂

Enjoying this newsletter? You can support my work and buy me a coffee.

Thanks for reading!

Dawid Dylowicz