Welcome to the 129th issue!

Someone on Reddit shared an excellent write-up answering the following questions:

• How to get started in QA?
• What's the difference between the QA roles?
• What are the possible career paths?
• What you should do first?

So if you're planning to become a tester, go ahead and check out this thread.

Happy testing!

Dawid Dylowicz  

Not all test data is created equally — Meet Tonic.ai

Through its data de-identification, advanced subsetting, and synthetic scaling technologies, Tonic.ai makes it possible to create test data that acts, looks and feels like production. Shorten your development cycle, eliminate the need for cumbersome data pipeline work, and guarantee the privacy of your data. Check it out.

tonic.ai  

Building a Project With Quality in Mind

Here's some good advice from Louis-Philip Grenier about embedding the quality mindset when starting a new project.

Similarly, Cameron Laird shared equally good insights on the DevOps Testing Culture: How to Build Quality Throughout the SDLC.

medium.com  

Different ways of working with APIs as a tester

APIs are one of the most popular interfaces you'll encounter, so it's good to know the ways of testing them. Bas Dijkstra wrote a helpful guide about it.

inspiredtesting.com  

How Do You Grow a Senior QA on Your Team?

Whether you're a test lead or a senior member of the team, chances are you'll find yourself helping other people grow. Alexey Anisimov has lots of practical tips that you might find useful.

medium.com  

Software Testing Strategy for Localization

This is a great series of articles on challenges in testing localization and examples of solving them. You can read the second part here.

medium.com  

Testing Principles 101

Melissa Fisher shares six powerful testing principles including some feedback from other testers, which shows how important iteration is.

Additionally, Rahul Parwal shared the 10 Testing Issues That Concern Me Often.

medium.com  

Testing Alone and Under Fire

Imagine you're left on your own with testing and there's no one to give advice. What would you do? Martin Ivison shares 10 rules that may come in handy in such a situation.

Moreover, Paulo Oliveira shared useful Tips To Work If You Are the Only QA On the Team.

medium.com  

A Dog’s Life With Test Fixtures

Rafał Lewandowski shows how to properly set up test fixtures to improve your unit tests. It can easily be applied to higher-level types of tests, too.

Similarly, Elias Nogueira wrote a practical guide with examples explaining How to use the Factory design pattern to create browser instances.

medium.com  

How can I trust my test suite?

Great question! Antonello D'Ippolito suggests using some metrics and indicators that can help you assess the confidence in your tests.

Also, Paul Grizzaffi wrote about Asserting Them Softly — Soft Asserts In Practice, explaining how it can help you better understand the failing tests in a test suite.

mollie.com  

How low-level API calls can stabilize your end-to-end tests

Who said end-to-end tests for the web have to focus solely on the UI? Nico Domino shows a great example of leveraging Playwright features to support such tests with API calls.

checklyhq.com  

How To Refactor Your Acceptance Tests

If you work on a legacy test framework or your tests are not performing well enough, Lewis Prescott gives a few good pieces of advice on how to do the test refactoring.

Additionally, Chris Enitan explains that it may also help to Build tests as modules.

testproject.io  

Should I Learn Test Automation?

Whether you're already a tester or just thinking of starting a career in testing, you may want to read Nicola Lindgren's article explaining if it's worth learning test automation.

nicolalindgren.com  

Questions To Ask (And Answer) Before Setting Up A Test Automation Framework

Arinze Obikili shares eight great questions that you can ask yourself when choosing a new tool or thinking of implementing a new test framework.

arinzeobikili.com  

Book recommendations

Looking for reads on software testing? Not only you! Someone asked for a recommendation on Reddit and got quite good suggestions from the community.

reddit.com  

Shifting QA Left: Emerging Trends in Code Quality and Security Automation

In this 29-min talk, Stephen Magill shares the best practices and principles for implementing shift-left testing using static analysis.

softwaretestingmagazine.com  

Old but gold... 😂

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.

PS. I'll be transferring every donation to Nasz Wybór Foundation which supports Ukrainian refugees in Poland. 🇺🇦 🙏

Dawid Dylowicz