Welcome to the 135th issue!

And welcome back! 🙌

It was great to switch off and take a well-deserved break. I definitely feel refreshed and full of energy.

So today, let's start with an article that got my attention:

Why should testers start writing blogs? by Balaji Santhanagopalan.

You see, I've been running this newsletter for over 2.5 years now and I've seen many first-time writers that shared great content. I've featured many of them here.

I truly believe everyone has something interesting to share, even when they're just starting in software testing. And writing is a great way to get visibility, build your brand, and even learn something new.

So if you're still hesitating, give it a try! And don't forget to share with me. 🙂

Happy testing!

Dawid Dylowicz  

Learn Web App Testing with WebdriverIO

This course is your guide to the key testing ideas for writing reliable, useful tests. It covers what WebdriverIO does, along with how you'll be using it day-to-day. Add more value to your work and improve your ability to get things done. Start learning now!

webdriver.io  

Have you faced Imposter Syndrome in your QA career?

It's not rare to feel worse than you actually are. Many engineers have a lot of concerns compared to others. Testers are no different. Here are a lot of opinions, lessons learned and pieces of advice shared by the community on Reddit.

Also, sometimes it may Feel like I am burning out. Here's some advice on how to overcome that.

reddit.com  

How to Effectively Hire Testers to Join Your Team

If you're hiring testers, you might be interested in Dennis Martinez's article explaining why it's important to prepare for hiring and how to make the process more effective for you and the candidate.

Moreover, Daria Kudryavtseva wrote a great guide to Onboarding a Senior QA: week-by-week plan.

dev-tester.com  

Lessons From My 2nd Year as a Quality Assurance Engineer

Following up on the one year in testing reflection that Atul Jha shared last year, here are his lessons learned after two years in testing.

medium.com  

Making Great Waves: 8 Software Testing Convictions

Inspired by the famous Japanese art, Andrew Knight describes eight valuable lessons that he learned in his software testing career.

automationpanda.com  

Non-Functional Requirements Explained in Practice

Formulating good requirements is crucial to successful testing. So how do you deal with the non-functional ones? Yaroslav Dobroskok gives some advice and shares a few good examples.

medium.com  

Zalando Quality Engineering Journey—From Monolith to Microservices

In yet another great deep dive, Antoine Craske explains the architectural transformation that Zalando has gone through and how it impacted the quality practices in their team.

You might also be interested in learning Joep Schuurkes's view on Quality: different purposes, different definitions.

qeunit.com  

API Testing: Using the Fluent Interface Pattern for JSON Assertions

Asserting big API responses can get burdensome. So is there a better way? Patrick Prill shows how to improve the clarity of assertions by using the Fluent Interface design pattern.

wordpress.com  

Better Page Objects strategy using AjaxElementLocatorFactory with Selenium and Java

Page Object is a great pattern, but it can get even better. Elias Nogueira shares a great guide to optimising the wait strategy.

eliasnogueira.com  

Quality Gates in Agile Development

Christian Nissen wrote a decent article describing the various checks you can set up in your pipeline to increase the confidence of stable releases.

There are also other things you can do to improve the process as Sam Connelly explains in the article: Meh to awesome pipelines.

medium.com  

Testability and how to improve it

Ever wondered what testability means? And how you can influence it? Well, Oleksandr Romanov has got you covered with this excellent overview.

github.io  

You Should Test More Using APIs

That's a great reminder from Gleb Bahmutov about leveraging APIs to support testing web apps. Lots of examples included.

glebbahmutov.com  

Introducing Headlamp: “Augmented Reality” for Testers

Follow the dots to find more bugs! Headlamp is the visual test tracking & analytics tool for Solo Testers, Test Teams, and Test Automation. Visualize the gaps in your tests. Get real-time reports on test team progress. Collaborate with your teammates to get full coverage quickly. Install the free Chrome extension and start finding bugs in less than 1 minute. Try it free.

headlamptest.com  

Best practice in test automation with Cypress

If you're using Cypress to test your apps, you may want to learn about Elisha Dongol's examples of five dos and don'ts.

medium.com  

Load testing with Artillery and Playwright

How about using your existing end-to-end tests for load testing? Katarzyna Kmiotek shows how you can achieve it with Artillery and Playwright.

katk.dev  

Separate Node.js unit, integration, and E2E tests using Jest projects

If you're looking for a quick way to set up different test levels in Node, here's a handy guide with code examples by Dávid Szabó.

daveiscoding.com  

Testkube: The Kubernetes-native testing framework

Looking for ways of testing Kubernetes? Shivam Katare shows how to set up and run TestKube — an open-source tool for the job.

kubeworld.org  

Top 10 Accessibility Testing Tools for Websites

There are plenty of tools for web accessibility testing. Here's a helpful overview of ten of them prepared and described by Marie Drake.

applitools.com  

Exploratory Software Testing by James A. Whittaker

Željko Filipin wrote a nice review of the Exploratory Software Testing book including a short summary and quotes.

Speaking of that, you might also be interested in Venkat Ramakrishnan's thoughts on Exploratory Testing Demystified.

filipin.eu  

Ah, automation... 😂

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