Issue 79

COMMENT

Welcome to the 79th issue!

Today is a special day because there are over 3,000 of you now! 🎉

Thank you very much.

Without you, this newsletter surely wouldn't make it this far.

My promise has always been very simple — to give you the most valuable software testing news every week.

And I'm delighted to see you're enjoying it.

So, happy testing! 🙌

NEWS

3P’s For Your New Testing Adventure

Starting a new testing job? Emna Ayadi has a few valuable tips for you about the 3P: People, Product and Process, alongside other heuristics. There are many references to other great resources, too!

And for more Software Testing Heuristics, check out this article by Paulo Oliveira.

How To Build a Valuable Observability Pipeline

Another week, another great article by Antoine Craske. This time, he wrote a guide on building observability pipeline — a part of the shift-right testing approach.

How to make QA more visible in the organization?

The common problem with QA is that it's hard to make it visible company-wide. Someone asked on Reddit how to solve that problem and many people shared their advice.

Learning while Testing

How would you test something with little or no requirements? Maaret Pyhäjärvi shows a great example of how you can use exploratory testing approach to learn about the subject under test and come up with test cases on the go.

The Quality Maturity Model

Kristin Jackvony shares a concept of assessing quality with the Quality Maturity Model based on 7 attributes and explains how this can be applied in our workplaces.

AUTOMATION

Conway’s Law for Test Automation?

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure. — Melvin E. Conway

This is a very interesting law and it gets even more interesting when you think of it in the context of test automation — as Jesper Ottosen explained here.

Exploratory Test Automation

I don't follow "a process" during testing, I just use common sense and see where that gets me. — Maaike Brinkhof

Can test automation be exploratory? Patrick Prill claims so and lays out some good reasons for it.

Modern Problems With Test Automation

No one said test automation is easy nor it's going to solve all the problems. Especially when you're starting with it. Oleksandr Romanov mentions the common pitfalls and gives 7 pieces of advice on how to avoid them.

Self-Healing Testing using Deep Learning Algorithms

Now, this is deep. Por Yee Ong wrote an amazing article about how his team tried applying deep learning algorithms combined with various tools in pursuit of the dream of all engineering teams — self-healing tests.

CI/CD pipelines are software artefacts

Bob Salmon shares an interesting point of view on building CI/CD pipelines just as production software.

And if you're looking for a more general explanation, Dennis Martinez wrote about Why Is Continuous Integration Important For Testing?.

TOOLS

Automating SSRF

Server Side Request Forgery is a common form of attack in web apps. So how can we test it? Ayush Pandey listed out several interesting tools and techniques that you can use.

Custom tooling for the test stack management

Mirek Stanek shares how the custom-built test cycle management tool called AutomationTestSupervisor helped him and his team improve the mobile testing workflow.

How to Build Performance Tests To Validate Your APIs Using Gatling

This is a detailed guide to Gatling — an open-source load testing tool. Gavin Fong did a great job not only describing how it works but also sharing many code examples.

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

BOOKS

Be a Quality Detector

Inspired by the Thinking in Systems: A Primer book, James Thomas shared his favourite quotes and thoughts in the context of being a Quality Detector.

And if you'd like to learn more about systems thinking in general, Kislay Verma found a great collection of lectures by Russell L. Ackoff.

VIDEOS

A card trick about test code

What happens to tests when the application code changes? Check out yet another short video where Benjamin Bischoff explains it using cards.

Shift-left Testing — The Right Way

Toyer Mamoojee gave a nice presentation about shift-left testing which was followed by some really interesting questions.

And if you prefer reading rather than watching, Niranjani Manoharan wrote a solid article about When Nothing Goes Right, Shift Left!.

AND...

Some bugs are bigger than others... 😂

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.

Issue 79 July 9th 2021