Welcome to the 145th issue!

While browsing Reddit this week, an interesting thread caught my eye:

Do you enjoy your QA job?

I went through the comments and realised that people like it for various reasons.

And this made me reflect on why I enjoy what I've been doing for nearly 10 years now.

So here are the three most important and constant factors to me (apart from the salary):

1. Diversity. And I mean both people as well as work. I like the idea of a tester's role as a glue between different functions. For example, one day I'm working with product managers, the other day with developers, and another day with customers.
2. Challenge. Software testing isn't easy. There's a lot of uncertainty and subjectivity to it that makes participation in every project a challenging experience. But thanks to that, I can't get bored of it.
3. Impact. It works both ways — I can impact the quality and delivery of critical projects as well as help my colleagues become better testers. And wearing many hats naturally creates more opportunities for that.

Now, over to you. What do you enjoy the most about being a software tester?

Happy testing! 😊

Dawid Dylowicz  

Black Friday is coming! Will your site be ready?

Traditional methods don’t always test eCommerce applications the way customers shop, and writing stable tests that capture user scenarios and products at scale is tedious. See how Visual AI can help you test faster, protecting your eCommerce applications and providing a new level of confidence. Free seminar.

applitools.com  

Built-In Quality: A Reality Check

What practices can help teams create quality products? Venkat Ramakrishnan gives a good overview.

In relation to that, James Thomas wrote a thought-provoking article about Satisfying the Requirements.

venkatramakrishnan.com  

GitLab Organization for Quality & Velocity

Curious about how GitLab's quality practices? Antoine Craske wrote a thorough overview explaining each one of them.

You may also want to learn from Bas van Laarhoven about How To Set Up An Easy Agile Testing Process To Keep The Bugs away.

qeunit.com  

Reviewing Capgemini's "World Quality Report 2022-23"

Quite a few companies do annual surveys about software testing and quality-related matters. Here's an honest analysis of one of them by Lee Hawkins.

wordpress.com  

Software Testers Survival Guide — How to get through an economic downturn as a tester

In a time of slowdown and layoffs, such pieces of advice from Keith Klain can be especially helpful.

Similarly, Vernon Richards shares the 10 Things I've Seen Testers Do To Get Through A Recession Or A Redundancy.

And finally, Sam Connelly explains why it's worth Having multiple CVs.

qualityremarks.com  

The easily forgotten test cases

Team Merlin shares a helpful cheat sheet of common test cases for APIs and web apps.

It may also be worth knowing how to Estimate Time to Test.

medium.com  

The Multiverse of Testing

How many roles does a modern tester have? Quite a few as Sahil Puri explains using an interesting metaphor.

Speaking of roles, Joep Schuurkes asks: Agile tester or quality engineer, who’s to say?

medium.com  

End-to-End that's a true End-to-End

Ryan Craven reminds us what end-to-end really means and how we can improve our tests to meet such coverage.

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

medium.com  

Practical tips to writing clean code for test automation

In this thorough article, Rex Jones II shows examples of clean code practices that can help you write maintainable tests.

On top of that, Gleb Bahmutov shares some Tips And Tricks For Writing Fast And Maintainable Front-End Tests with Cypress.

accelq.com  

What is the purpose of automated testing?

This is one of the fundamental questions that we may often forget to ask. So it's interesting to see different perspectives and opinions shared here.

reddit.com  

Your performance tests are smelly!

There are various ways of designing and implementing performance tests. Eldad Uzman gives some hints on what to be mindful of.

Also, you might be interested in Justin Bailey's Deep Dive Into K6 Performance Testing Tool For Automation Testing.

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

testproject.io  

Cypress vs Playwright: some comparison elements

This is an interesting analysis of the two tools that sparked an equally interesting discussion in the comments on Reddit.

There's also another thread asking for opinions on Selenium or Cypress? What is better to learn?.

reddit.com  

Getting started with Espresso Android and Robot pattern

In this detailed, practical guide, Robert Gorter shows how to set up and write mobile tests using Android's official test framework — Espresso.

medium.com  

Selenium 4.6.0 released with Selenium Manager

The latest version of Selenium 4.6.0 brings a long-awaited feature for automatic browser management. Thanks for highlighting it, Dheeraj Gambhir.

You can find out more about it in the official article: Introducing Selenium Manager.

blogspot.com  

WebdriverIO with Appium: Beyond the perfect scenario

If you want to use JavaScript to test both iOS and Android mobile apps, there is a way. Marcelo Soares explains a possible solution and associated challenges of using WebdriverIO and Appium.

medium.com  

Closing a sprint... 🤣

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