NEWS
A Typical Agile Sprint (Satire)
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.
Achieve More with Less: Pareto’s Principle in Software Testing
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.
How to prepare for Software Testing Interview
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.
Shift Left: Fail faster in 7 Steps
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.
Why I Love Software Testing
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.
AUTOMATION
5 Reasons Why Test Automation Frameworks Tend To Fail
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.
Always write at least 1 end-to-end test. You'll love it, I promise.
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.
Creating A Test Automation Portfolio Episode 6: C# Solution For UI Automation Using Selenium 4.0
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#.
How to run isolated tests using Docker Compose on AWS
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.
Mobile E2E tests using WebdriverIO and Appium
Fernando Martín Ortiz shows a great example of how you can test the UI of mobile apps in JavaScript with Appium and WebdriverIO.
TOOLS
Cross browser visual testing — Picking the right tool
Thinking of doing visual testing? Denitsa Kulezich described a handful of paid and free tools for the job that you may want to check.
Everyday tools in a life of Software QA
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.
Battle-Test Your API With Artillery Load Testing
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.
Load Testing WebSockets With k6
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.
Software testing resource pack
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.
VIDEOS
Top 21+ Good Websites for Practicing Automation Testing
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.
Sponsored Jobs
[London] Lead Mobile QA Engineer @ Smarkets
At Smarkets we are looking for a Lead Mobile QA Engineer. 75% of our staff are engineers, we re-write ~40% of the code base each year & we ship multiple times a day. This year we want to speed up the feature development of our Mobile apps. The role will incorporate lots of automation testing as well as exploratory testing through the apps.
COMMENT
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