Welcome to the special 200th issue!

I'm stunned it's been 4 years already and there are over 7,000 of you!

I want to wholeheartedly thank every single one of you.

I also want to congratulate over 1,500 authors whose content I've featured over the years.

And finally, huge thanks to the 63 sponsors who have supported this newsletter so far, especially Testmo, Vornex, Mabl, Mailsac, MagicPod, Applitools, PractiTest and Testsigma.

That wouldn't be possible without your consistent support.

Thank you very, very much! 🙏

To celebrate all these milestones, I'm sharing some of your and mine favourite news from 2023.

Enjoy, and happy testing! 🙂

Dawid Dylowicz  

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AI

• AI Needs Testing — Jason Arbon
• Testing Language Models (and Prompts) Like We Test Software — Marco Túlio Ribeiro and Scott Lundberg
• Testing LLM-Based Applications: Strategy and Challenges — Xin Chen

Basics

• Bug Severity and Priority Matrix — Dilara Atesogullari
• QA 101: how to manage product quality right from the start — Olya Kolyada
• QA Wiki — Luc Gagan
• Shifting left and what it means for QA — Reddit

Career

• How much do testers make? — Reddit
• Is It Time You Moved On from Quality Engineering? — Stuart Thomas
• What your QA career progression has been like? — Reddit

Future

• Is Manual Testing Dying? — Reddit
• Language for QA Automation in 2024? — Reddit
• Should We Fear AI in Test Automation? — Richard Bradshaw
• What Does QA Work Look Like in the Era of AI? — Patrick Ramser

Guides

• Bugs backlog automation. RICE for bugs — Gleb Sarkisov
• How to Create a Quality Strategy and Testing Model — Stuart Thomas
• How to Streamline Quality Assurance: Real Case Improving Product Quality — Oleksandr Strukov
• The Swiss Cheese Model for Quality Engineering — Imran Qureshi

How others test

• How Microsoft does QA — Gergely Orosz
• How WhatsApp tests software? — Gaurav Singh
• Zoopla's Holistic Testing Model — Stuart Thomas

Leadership

• Build a Great QA Competency Framework — Part 3 — Robbie Falck
• Head of QA: Year One — Gleb Sarkisov
• Strategy House of QA leader — Dmytro Stekanov
• Tips For QA Leaders In Delivering Exceptional Products — Konstantinos Konstantakopoulos

Lessons learned

• Maybe Getting Rid of a QA Team was Bad, Actually — David Caudill
• Six months without a tester — Maxilect
• Software Testing for 20 years — Patrick Prill

Metrics & data

• 32 Software testing statistics suitable for your presentation in 2024 — Global App Testing
• A Way to Effectiveness: Release Quality, Volume and Speed in 1 QA Metric — Gleb Sarkisov
• Easy measures to observe our software quality efficiency — Julien Barlet
• If It Cannot Be Measured, It Cannot Be Improved — Alex Shurov
• Need a Testing Metric? Put Points on Your Test Cases — Mas Kono and Paul Grizzaffi

Principles

• 5 Principles for Quality at Speed — Antoine Craske
• Essential Principles of Software Quality Engineering — Maria Golubeva
• Laws of Testing — Jason Arbon

Resources

• 10 Github Repositories for Software Testers — Natalia Demianenko
• Applications to Practice Testing and Automation — Alan Richardson
• Awesome Learning Resources for Testers — Mohammad Faisal Khatri
• Risk-first — Exploring risks that ruin software projects — Rob Moffat

Roles and responsibilities

• A good tester is all over the place — Joep Schuurkes
• My Role as Quality and Test Specialist — Jeff Nyman
• Quality Coaching: A Road Less Traveled — Mirza Šišić
• What does a QA Lead do? — Jayateerth Katti

Skills

• Human skills to win in Software Testing — Gaurav Singh
• Mastering T-Shaped Skills — Sławomir Radzymiński
• Skills needed to stay ahead of the QA crowd? — Reddit

Tips

• 21 Tips for QA (2023 Edition) [Part 1], Part 2, Part 3 — Manish Saini
• How to advocate for testability — John Gluck
• What every engineer should know about fault scenarios — Lucas Silveira
• What questions should I ask as a new QA in the Team/Organization? — Mohammad Faisal Khatri

Thought-provoking

• I hate writing test cases… — Reddit
• QA is not a cost center — Dan Petersen
• The Economics, Value and Service of Testing — Jeff Nyman
• Why BDD sucks in practice — Drew Ayling

Security testing

• 25 Tools & Extra Tactics For App Security — Rafał Hofman
• OWASP Juice Shop — Björn Kimminich and Jannik Hollenbach
• OWASP Top 10 Privacy Risks – use these best practices to protect your clients — Monika Krysiak

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Design patterns

• Design Patterns for Test Automation Solutions: JavaScript/TypeScript Examples — Kostiantyn Teltov
• Not all UI tests are the same — Alex Zhukovich
• Testing Without Mocks: A Pattern Language — James Shore

Guides

• Moving from manual QA to automation: Possible step-by-step plan and practical advice for beginners — Kostiantyn Teltov
• To Automate or Not to Automate? Deciding Which Tests to Automate for Maximum Efficiency — Neil Matillano
• Understanding Test Doubles: An In-Depth Look — Đạt Phạm Văn
• Using the OpenAI platform to analyse automated test failures — Andrei Rusu

How others automate

• Deduplicating software bugs with Machine Learning at Google — Carlos Arguelles, Babu Prasad and Vidhi Gupta
• How the Miro Developer Platform leverages contract testing — Elena Ignatik
• The reverse load test: it worked for us at k6 — Marko Pandurovic

Lessons learned

• 10 changes that improved our tests — Tom Perry
• How we improved reporting and monitoring of test automation results — Giuseppe Donati
• Why Test Automation Projects Fail (and How We Might Succeed) — Michael Bolton

Mobile testing

• How They Automate on Mobile — Alexey Alter-Pesotskiy
• Reddit's E2E UI Automation Framework for Android — Dinesh Gunda and Denis Ruckebusch
• Managing iOS Tests at Scale: A Symphony — Atakan Karslı
• Reddit's UI Testing Strategy and Tooling for iOS — Lakshya Kapoor, Parth Parikh and Abey Thomas
• Two strategies to drive screenshot testing in Mobile projects — Ubiratan Soares

Performance testing

• Automated performance testing guide — Pepe Cano
• Load Testing Made Simpler with Resource Object Model — Enes Kühn
• Making Sense of Performance Testing Results — Irfan Mujagić

Principles

• Laws of Test Automation — Jason Arbon
• SOLID principle examples in Test Automation — Kostiantyn Teltov
• Test Desiderata — Kent Beck

Tips

• 10 Tips to Reduce Test Automation Execution Times — Joe Colantonio
• Fail Fast, Succeed Faster… — John Gimber
• How do you deal with unstable test automation environment? — Reddit
• Top 17 Automated Testing Best Practices (Supported By Data) — Nikolay Advolodkin

Test design

• Do not put assertions in Page Objects, why? — Tan Do
• Do your tests communicate? — Osher El-Netanany
• Why Dumb Tests are Smart — Roy Straub
• Writing Tests That Actually Test — Jahdunsin Osho

Test framework

• A New API Direction for Testing in Swift — Apple
• Framework Agnostic UI Testing — Shelly Goldblit
• New UI Test Automation Model — Gil Zur
• Test Automation Frameworks: Page Object Model vs. Page Component Object Model — Gorilla Logic

• A11y testing tools for contrast and WCAG in practical use — Anna Borgosz and Małgorzata Czuluk
• ChatGPT Sucks for Test Automation — Jason Arbon
• The Definitive Guide to API Test Automation With Playwright (16 parts) — Butch Mayhew

• The 17 Best Software Testing Books of All Time — Paulo Gardini Miguel
• Useful books on testing, automation and engineering — Oleksandr Romanov

• Best Software Testing YouTube Channels for QA in 2023 — Marcin Łojewski

Test environment... 😂

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