Welcome to the 70th issue!

It's hard to believe it's the 70th consecutive week that I'm sending this newsletter.

Today, it's reaching over 2,700 software testers.

So I just want to say thank you for reading it every week.

It means a lot to me and I'm happy that you find value here.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Dawid Dylowicz

Last week, I featured Anne-Marie Charrett's article on 3 amigos in Agile. This time, she shared more about the modern version where the QA role differs from the traditional one. I found it both interesting and accurate.

Some may say testing is all about the automation nowadays but this is far from the truth. Edward Kelly explains why the balance between manual and automated efforts is the key to successful testing in Agile.

So what do "the days" look like now? I liked Jeff Sing's explanation of the modern approach to Quality Engineering.

A great addition to that is Janet Gregory's article about Testing From A Holistic Point Of View.

There have been several of articles written on how Google tests software (mainly based on the famous book) but these lessons are so valuable, they're well worth repeating. Here Dilusha Kumarage did a great job describing the key concepts.

In most cases, only checking that requirements are met is simply not enough testing. So these are just a few questions that Maria Kedemo advises testers to ask while testing.

Testability is one of these things that's much easier to be built-in rather than built on top of implementation. Gregory Paciga explains why it's not a trivial problem and what a tester can do to help developers care for that.

Viral Patel shares some great pieces of advice on what to pay attention to when building a test framework.

Usually, when a test has multiple assertions and the first one fails, the program stops immediately. Dmitry Shyshkin shares an example of changing this behaviour and making the test run all assertions before exiting.

Thinking of implementing API tests with Cucumber? Gavin Fong got you covered and shared a nice guide on how to do it.

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

Here's a simple guide by Paweł Świątkowski that may come in handy when deciding on how to fight the flaky tests.

The other useful tactic to improve tests (and not only) is the Dev Box technique suggested by André Guimarães.

Bas Dijkstra gives great pieces of advice on what to keep in mind when learning test automation.

Moreover, Alan Page wrote a decent article on Learning Automation – The Collaborative Way.

A lot has changed since 2015 in terms of web UI testing tools and it's interesting to follow the experience of Josh Grant who was sceptical about JavaScript-based tools at first, but now recommends using WebdriverIO.

Cypress has recently released Cypress Studio — a test recorder for web (something like Selenium IDE). Filip Hric explains how to get started, how it works and who it is for.

If you use VisualCode as your primary IDE, you may like news from Sumanth Sanathi about the Thunder Client extension that is a GUI for API tests. Just like Postman, but right in your IDE. Handy!

Following up on Josh's article above, it seems that we're slowly hitting what many developers have been experiencing for a while — the choice overload. Here are some interesting insights.

In this interesting presentation, Gil Zilberfeld explains the process of implementing a quality metrics dashboard for API teams and what benefits it brought to them.

I'd love to be a tester in this project... 😂

Thanks for reading!

If you like this newsletter and it helps you become a better tester, you can say thanks and buy me a coffee.

Dawid Dylowicz