Welcome to the 94th issue!

What a story shared by Shantnu Tiwari this week!

"The Day My Script Killed 10,000 Phones in South America".

I find it both scary and amusing at the same time. 😅

I mean, it's generally a good practice to use realistic test data but not when testing in production, as it turns out.

So always think twice and test thrice.

Happy testing!

Dawid Dylowicz

This is a good reminder from Nishi Grover Garg about the importance of continuous work on improving quality where every member is actively involved — not only testers.

Similarly, Kinga Witko emphasises why the tester will not leverage the quality of your project.

There's nothing more I can add to the accurate points raised by Blake Norrish about the behaviours and ways of thinking that make great testers great.

Moreover, Dmitry Yarygin has some decent pieces of advice in his article about the 5 Confessions of a Software Test Engineer.

If you write test cases, why not do it right? Roselyne Makena shares a few solid tips and shows examples of well-written and badly-written test cases.

And once you have them, do you think it's a good idea to implement a number of test cases created and executed as the main metric to measure QA work?

Dhanalaxmi Otari explains what regression testing really is about and what strategies you can use to make the most use of it.

Additionally, Sri Priya P Kulkarni wrote a nice article about How to do Regression Testing?.

Curious about how to come up with test cases? Here's a great example of practising product analysis and testing based on traffic rules that Yuliia Kuprii came up with. I'd recommend starting with the first part.

Related to that, Sithira Pathirana shows how to properly do Exploratory Testing with "Test Charter".

Good user experience and usability are crucial to the success of any product. Harold Fernandes explains why it's also important for testers to get involved and how to do it right.

Brijendra Singh lists out the phases of test data generation and shares a comprehensive example of an end-to-end test data generation process.

A good complementary read to that is Steven Burton's article describing why structure, content and volume are the main areas to focus on with data validation.

If you're not aware of the most popular design pattern in UI test automation yet, check out Coby Guo's guide explaining the what, the why and the how of the Page Object Model and Page Factory.

Lyudmil Latinov wrote a complete, end-to-end example of using the latest Selenium's observability feature to be able to trace the tests.

This is a solid step-by-step guide by Amit Davidi about setting up Android UI tests from scratch with the Detox framework and running them on CI.

Here's a great explanation of the alternative ways of doing contract and conformance testing. Written by Venkatesh-Prasad Ranganath who took part in compatibility testing of USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 in Windows 8.

What does it take to practice test automation? Ravisuriya Eswara put together guidelines for introducing the test automation mindset. I reckon it can be even used as a checklist to measure progress.

In relation to that, it's also worth reading Dennis Martinez's recent article about The Importance of Maintaining Your Automated Tests.

Speaking of speeding up Cypress tests, Laerte Neto gives an overview of four ways of parallelisation, including open-source tools such as Sorry Cypress, cypress-parallel, and even a manual approach on CI.

Gleb Bahmutov has recently created the cypress-data-session plugin that allows reusing data that's expensive to create. This article explains how it works and how it can make your Cypress tests even faster and more efficient.

As I mentioned last week, Selenium 4.0 was officially released. Naturally, this is massive news and the software testing community was positively vocal about it, sharing some more articles. Apart from the excellent overview by Selçuk Temizsoy linked in the title, there are a couple more:

1. A simple guide to upgrading to Selenium 4.0 by Beth Marshall.
2. The overview of Selenium 4 features by Rex Jones II.

... not what you think! Anand Bagmar makes a good point that instead of looking for a silver bullet, it's much better to evaluate tools that solve certain problems best.

Also, sometimes it's not about big test frameworks at all. Sometimes Tiny Software Testing Tools Can Make A Big Difference In Testing Results, as Andrea Jensen shows.

If you're looking for a high-level overview of the relation between quality and testing, here's a decent 50-minute talk given by Janet Gregory, the co-author of the popular Agile Testing book.

Callum Akehurst-Ryan posted an awesome collection of 10 talks that he's given over the years on various topics, such as exploratory testing, accessibility testing, web testing, and more.

Days since the last timezone issue... 😂

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