Welcome to the 90th issue!

The best lessons are the ones you learn yourself.

The second best are the ones you learn from others.

So what's the ONE piece of testing advice for your younger self?

Take a moment for this small reflection.

And then follow that link to check out what others say.

Happy testing!

Dawid Dylowicz

Is there anything (or maybe everything) you'd like to know about exploratory testing? Callum Akehurst-Ryan answered a lot of practical questions asked by the testing community.

Long gone are days when test plans were all the same. And that's good. The whole purpose of them is to plan testing and Jesper Ottosen shows another interesting way of achieving it.

Continuing the amazing series on leadership in testing, Paul Gerrard shares valuable pieces of advice on how to keep growing in the leadership role and career.

Kelly Chin reflects on how the remote work enforced shift-left testing in her team and how that changed her regular day as a software tester.

Trying to get your first job in software testing? Justin Bailey shares ten tips on how to prepare for job hunts, interviews, and more.

Once you get that, Jamaal Todd wrote about 3 Considerations For Beginner Testers and also warned to be mindful of Avoiding Burnout As The Only Tester.

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

Bugs in software are unavoidable. It's a fact. So what can you do about it? Ben Hosking advises on accepting it and moving on because: "If you aren’t making any mistakes, then you are playing it too safe and developing too slowly.".

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

João Brandão describes why structuring tests in the Given, When, Then format is so effective, to the point that he also applied it to... his life!

Another good practice is Writing Automated Tests in Small Increments as Corina Pip explains.

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

If you automate tests for web, you might be wondering whether using headless browsers is effective. Well, Zhimin Zhan shares some insights about it.

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

Here's a great guide by Manuel Camargo to implementing Cucumber on top of Cypress for descriptive, behaviour-driven tests.

And speaking of Cypress, Theo McCauley shares a good lesson about When to Use Commands vs Assertions.

Martin Thoma put together a complete, introductory guide to performance testing explaining the key definitions, testing types and showing examples in various tools.

Also, Ken Ahrens shared more about the Considerations to Make When Running a Load Test.

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

If you're wondering how you can run Postman tests on CI, Pedro Morais shows how to integrate them via the Newman CLI tool on GitHub Actions.

Visual testing is a handy way of finding UI changes that regular test automation frameworks can't. Marie Drake gives some pieces of advice on how you can approach it.

Thinking of what tools you can use to test GraphQL APIs? Pricilla Bilavendran and Priyanka Brahmane have quite a few examples in Postman and Karate.

Slack as a test supporting tool? Why not! Johanna South describes how it can be used to manage mobile devices for testing. This turns out to be more sophisticated than I thought!

SelectorsHub — the popular XPath and CSS selector tool created by Sanjay Kumar — has just been upgraded to the 4.0 version which brings in some new features, including fast XPath validation.

We all know that using the sleep() function is an anti-pattern in tests. Luckily, there are much smarter ways of waiting for actions to finish. Chanuka Dinuwan shares a bunch of tools for the job.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World is not the kind of book that you'd expect to read if you want to learn about software testing but Lee Hawkins found some great similarities to deep testing and that can come in handy in your day-to-day job.

Anton Angelov gave an interesting talk on software testing metrics, including meaningful tagging of bug reports that can help you in further analysis and improvements of the software development process.

How would you test this phone number selector?... 🤣

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