Welcome to the 224th issue!

Are your tests flaky? You're not alone.

It's a common problem, especially when you implement tests at scale.

Take Uber, for example. They have over 600,000 tests!

And here's a wonderful overview of Flaky Tests Overhaul at Uber.

But there's more advice:

• A Few Thoughts On Flaky Tests
• Are Your Automated UI Tests Unreliable? How to Keep Them Reliable

And finally, you can find more helpful resources by simply searching for "flaky" in this newsletter's archive.

Thanks Xiaoyang Tan, Yushan Lin, Sergey Balabanov, Butch Mayhew and Priyanshu Shekhar for sharing such great insights.

Flaky Happy testing! 🙂

Dawid Dylowicz  

Avoid Simple Email Errors That Could Violate GDPR

Protect your company's reputation from costly email mistakes. Explore our guide on programmatically ensuring emails are sent exactly as intended and only to the right recipients. Secure your company communications from the source.

mailsac.com  

Getting to know Exploratory Testing

If you want to learn about exploratory testing, Chompoonuch Rassameeamornrat wrote a fantastic overview with lots of references to trusted sources on this topic.

Moreover, Gil Zilberfeld explains why Testing = Exploration + Checking.

medium.com  

How to Foster a Culture of Quality in Practice?

It's a great question, and while setting quality culture is not an easy task, Karla Mieses gives a few tips on how to make it work.

Similarly, R M Dhananjay shares My thoughts on the most important QA practices to follow for QAs starting their career.

medium.com  

Murphy's Law is a tester's best friend

"Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." — Murphy's law. And here's what we, testers, can learn from it.

Additionally, James Thomas points out that it's not possible to test everything all the time in an interesting article titled Software Sisyphus.

medium.com  

My learning experience for CTFL — after scoring it at 90%

There are a lot of opinions on whether it's worth doing QA certification. I liked this honest one by Alan Liew on ISTQB-CTFL.

medium.com  

Risks of being a QA

In this popular Reddit thread, many people shared what they think about the biggest risks of being a tester.

I also found two other interesting discussions:

• Will the demand for testers decrease in the future?
• Does QA Engineering have a future?

reddit.com  

Avoid wasting CI resources with selective testing and pre-commit hook on iOS

If you're testing iOS apps, you might be interested in An Tran approach to selecting and running only a subset of tests, depending on what part of the app changed.

Similarly, Atakan Karslı shows how to achieve Selective Unit Testing on iOS: Achieve 80% Faster Feedback.

antran.app  

Choosing the Right Test Automation Framework

Whichever language and platform you work with, there are usually a lot of dedicated test tools and frameworks to choose from. Ryan Craven wrote a general guide on what to consider when faced with such a choice.

substack.com  

Managing failed Selenium tests. Retrieve console logs and screenshots

Using Selenium in Java? Roman Strokach shows how to build an error reporting and logging solution into your test framework.

medium.com  

The Hidden Benefits of Unit Testing

I know that testers usually don't write unit tests but it's an important part of the overall test strategy. So if you'd like to understand why it's worth doing, here are some insights from Francesco Borzì.

plainenglish.io  

Uploading a file to S3 — Integration test

Do you need to do integration tests with AWS? Isabel Garrido Cardenas uses an example to show how to achieve that.

hashnode.dev  

Gravity: Identify gaps in test coverage and prioritize test cases using AI

Gravity monitors real-world user behaviors and usage patterns in live production and test environments to generate quality analytics, identify test coverage gaps, and assist in prioritizing and generating test cases for tools like Cypress, Playwright, etc. Discover more: book a demo now. Stay tuned for the product launch in September!

smartesting.com  

It's Finally Here! A JSON Test Results Data Format

Matthew Thomas announces CTRF — an open-source test reported in JSON format. It already supports popular test runners, such as Cypress, Jest, Playwright, and many more.

medium.com  

Supercharging Your Test Automation Code With AI Assistance In Your IDE

If you want to know how AI can help you while coding automated tests in your IDE, Valentin Agapitov demonstrates a few examples.

ministryoftesting.com  

Top Test Reporting Tools and a Comprehensive Comparison

Bharat Varshney describes several popular test reporting tools for Java, JavaScript and other, more language-agnostic solutions.

And if you want to see a practical example, Meris Stupar shows how to set up Allure Reporting for Playwright.

medium.com  

Contract Testing 101 with Marie Drake & Lewis Prescott

Want to learn about contract testing? This one-hour overview by Marie Cruz, Lewis Prescott and Nikolay Advolodkin is a great way to start.

youtube.com  

Current State of QA Job Market, Future Trends and AI - Part 1

Evgeny Kim and Alex Khvastovich had an interesting conversation about the condition of the QA market and trying to predict what's coming next, especially in the context of AI. Here you can watch the second part.

youtube.com  

Adding more E2E tests... 😂

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