Issue 68

COMMENT

Welcome to the 68th issue!

Last week, someone reached out to me on LinkedIn asking if I can share some insights about quality metrics.

I remembered there were a few great articles that I included in the previous issues of Software Testing Weekly. I typed metrics in the search bar, quickly found them and sent them over.

So here's the tip, if you want to learn more about a certain technology, tool or approach, try the search bar. With nearly 1,500 links included since the beginning of this project, you'll likely find some useful information.

Hope that helps. 😊

Happy testing everyone!

NEWS

Contemporary Exploratory Testing

This is a great article by Maaret Pyhäjärvi explaining the modern approach to exploratory testing.

And a solid complimentary read to that is James Thomas's one on testing by exploring.

How to be a Customer Obsessed Tester

Prashant Hegde gives lots of pieces of advice on how to become a better tester by putting yourself in your customer shoes and start using your own product.

Is talking about "scaling" human testing missing the point?

"Attempting to assess product quality by asking humans to manually interact with every feature just doesn’t scale. When it comes to testing, there is one clear answer: automation."

This is the quote from Google's latest book that provoked Lee Hawkins to write this article. And frankly, he shared some great thoughts about it.

Test Managers — Do we need them?

Heather Reid asked the question and she didn't have to wait long for some interesting answers to come up from the software testing community.

Speaking of titles, Jamaal Todd shared a thought-provoking article on why "Test Automation Engineer" job titles can be damaging.

Testing strategies for agile teams

I liked Kislay Verma's take on why a microservice architecture can help speed up releases more than a monolith, and what types of testing are suitable for such an environment.

Why preventing and closing bugs help you sleep better

Here are some great insights from Pradeep Soundararajan on how a healthy work culture, combined with QA practices focused on preventing bugs in the first place, can benefit teams, projects and individuals.

AUTOMATION

CI/CD Benefits, Challenges and Best Practices for Your Team

CI/CD practices are a no-brainer for most software projects nowadays. Harish Rajora did a great job putting together the pros, cons and potential challenges of implementing them.

Estimating Test Automation Story Points is a Total Waste of Time

Zhimin Zhan shares his opinion on the uselessness of test automation estimates and points to a few resources that back it up. Quite thought-provoking!

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

How good do you have to be at programming in order to become QA automation tester?

This is one of these open questions that are not so easy to answer. Someone asked it on Reddit and I was positively surprised to find out the discussion in the comments was so intense.

Improving test efficiency

In this concise but informative article, John Paliotta shares seven actionable tips on reviewing your tests and making them more efficient.

What every developer should know to start writing tests

This is HUGE. Rodrigo explained why testing is beneficial for developers and addressed their common concerns related to testing. If you struggle to make developers write their own tests, this article might help in convincing them.

Related to that, Katya Aronov wrote an informative article about questions developers ask about test automation.

TOOLS

Cypress as BackEnd + FrontEnd tests?

Cypress is primarily used for UI testing, but it also has some API testing capabilities. So is it worth using it for both frontend and backend testing? There are some interesting insights in this Reddit thread.

Future of Angular E2E & Plans for Protractor

Big news from Protractor creators. This once-popular testing tool for Angular apps will end development support by the end of 2022. The reason? Most Angular developers and testers prefer Cypress (64%) and other tools (16%) nowadays.

I Need a Tool. Now

How do you decide on what tool to use? Iryna Suprun shares some solid tips on how to approach the decision process.

Performance Testing in Kubernetes using Kangal

NaveenKumar Namachivayam put together a good introduction to Kangal (aka Kubernetes and Go Automatic Loader) — an open-source framework for running performance tests on Kubernetes cluster using different load generators (supporting JMeter or Locust).

VIDEOS

What I've Learned From the State of Testing Report 2021

Last week, I mentioned the 2021 State of Testing report, including some analysis of it. Here's another good one by Pramod Dutta.

PODCASTS

10 great podcasts for software test engineers

If you want to expand your software testing knowledge by listening to podcasts, Chris Ward got you covered by preparing this helpful list of 10 popular ones and describing what you can expect from them.

AND...

When you let users find bugs... 🤣

Thanks for reading!

If it helps you become a better tester, you can support my work and buy me a coffee.

Issue 68 April 23rd 2021