Welcome to the 73rd issue!

Have you ever heard of StackOverflow?

I bet you have!

They just announced the 2021 Developer Survey.

In my opinion, it's the most important software engineering survey of the year.

And I believe testers have a lot to say in this regard, too.

So let's take the survey and show where we — testers — stand at.

Happy testing!

Dawid Dylowicz

It's rare to find reflections on software testing over such a long time. So this alone should be a great reason to read it. But when I add that it's coming from no one else than James Bach himself, it suddenly becomes THE article to read this week.

Thinking of moving from testing to development? Diego Casillas has some great pieces of advice on how to take the leap.

I bet not many of you work with video streaming. But if you do, you know it's not trivial to test at all. I used to be on that boat too and I wish that Domeniks Bisofs had written this article back then.

Here's a great overview by Anna Kalemba of the shift-left testing that emphasises the importance of getting QA and testing involved early in the project.

What are the best practices for writing acceptance criteria? Prashant Kumar explains the why and the how in a very clear way, including a robust example at the end.

What's load testing all about? Nicole van der Hoeven clearly laid out the key concepts, explained how to choose the right tool for the job, and shared an example of implementing and executing a load test.

Behavior-Driven Development is about much more than just test automation or tools. It's a process that in order to work efficiently, has to be implemented in full. So I liked how Seb Rose and Gáspár Nagy pointed out what's wrong and how to fix the problem.

Anyone familiar with the test pyramid knows that end-to-end UI tests are the most expensive to write, run and maintain. Fine, but what people really think about it? There are some decent insights in the comments of this Reddit thread.

I liked Aurélien Lair's example-based guide to mobile testing with Appium, showing how it can be useful in a real scenario.

Amit Michaely explains why test parallelisation is important and how to achieve it effectively, based on examples in Go that query MongoDB and Redis.

Additionally, Islam Taha wrote an interesting two-part article on Cypress parallelization with the Orchestrator. You can find the second part here.

As Sandeep Dinesh proves, Appium is not only useful for functional testing, but also for performance testing of iOS mobile apps! Especially when combined with the XCode Instruments.

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

You may know that Cypress — the popular tool mostly used for web test automation — allows API testing, too. But is it the right tool for it? Leonardo Galani doesn't think so and gives some valid reasons.

This is the tester we need...! 😂

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