And so, it happened!

Playwright surpassed Cypress in weekly NPM downloads.

But that's not all.

Since 2023, three main trends emerged:

• Cypress' growth slowed,
• Playwright exploded higher,
• Selenium significantly dropped.

Of course, it's only the JavaScript versions. Both Playwright and Selenium also support other languages, e.g. C#, Java and Python, which are not reflected here.

But it's a strong indicator of what tool is becoming testers' choice.

And if you want to learn more, Filip Hric and Jonathan Canales had an interesting discussion about it.

So, with that in mind, enjoy the 225th issue! 🙂

Dawid Dylowicz  

Transform Your Email Deliverability Testing With Cypress and Mailsac

Your email workflows don't have to end at the unit testing stage. Use Mailsac's guide to level up your email testing automation. From initiation with Cypress to delivery verification with Mailsac, we'll walk you from beginning to end.

mailsac.com  

Being a good Senior Tester means having an opinion

Continuing the great series on Senior Test Engineers, Callum Akehurst-Ryan explains the importance of having your own point of view on tools, processes and practices. This also includes Understanding the things we need to test.

cakehurstryan.com  

Rethinking Our Job as Software Testers: We Should Try to Test as Little as Possible

Joel Montvelisky has some good points on how the tester's role has evolved in the culture of Agile and DevOps and why it's important to approach testing holistically.

This is seconded by Rodrigo Alves Costa explaining The Evolving Role of Testers in Agile Teams: From Gatekeepers to Quality Enablers.

stickyminds.com  

Tricks that helped you find bugs

What does help testers in bug hunting the most? This Reddit thread is full of practical tips.

And so is Janet Gregory's advice on Deliberate Practice to improve your testing skills.

reddit.com  

What are the biggest challenges you've faced when starting out in QA?

Apart from the tough job market, some people mention lots of challenges they faced at the beginning of their careers and share the lessons they learned thanks to that.

reddit.com  

How do you decide which tests to automate?

This is great, high-level advice from Mike Harris on what types of tests are worth automating and why.

Additionally, Noemi Ferrera shares some thoughts on Structuring logical tests.

home.blog  

Implementing the Testing Pyramid… by breaking it!

This is an interesting take on the test pyramid. Instead of blindly investing in achieving high test coverage on the unit level, the author suggests testing the most changing code and critical areas.

medium.com  

My Automated Test Script Takes 45 Minutes To Run! Is This OK?

Paul Grizzaffi tells a story of automating manual tests to explain what makes a good test execution time. Spoiler — it's relative and depends on the context.

wordpress.com  

Test Automation Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Gaurav Verma explains the importance of KPIs, suggests which ones to use for test automation, and shows an example of a test automation coverage metric.

medium.com  

Supercharge Your Salesforce Testing with Low-Code, 10X Faster Automation! ⚡

Salesforce Test Automation by Testsigma is up and live! Experience a 10X increase in productivity with Testsigma's low-code, zero-set-up solution. The cloud-based platform also adapts to changes since it relies on Salesforce's metadata to locate elements. This ensures your testing is unbreakable, always accurate, and up-to-date. Ready to elevate your Salesforce testing game? Check it out!

testsigma.com  

Best Behavior-driven development (BDD) framework?

Wondering what BDD tools to use? Chamila Ambahera did a solid comparison of five open-source solutions for various languages.

medium.com  

Cypress vs Playwright — Flakiness Analysis

Andrew Goldis shared a very interesting analysis from 100s of real test projects to determine the difference in flakiness when Cypress or Playwright were used.

linkedin.com  

Cypress: Hidden Tricks You Need to Know

If you use Cypress for test automation, you might be happy to learn about some of these useful features described by Faris Niar.

Also, Gleb Bahmutov shows another helpful trick of Passing Cypress Test Info Via Request Headers.

medium.com  

Exploring AI-Powered Tools for Test Automation and Testing Assistance

The AI field is evolving quickly, and it also applies to testing. Danko Petrović wrote an insightful overview of the freely available AI tools that can help you in day-to-day work.

Additionally, Maaret Pyhäjärvi explains the benefits of GenAI Pair Testing.

linkedin.com  

Postman to k6 in under 5 minutes

Want to migrate Postman tests to k6? Ioan Solderea shows how to achieve that using the handy postman-to-k6 library.

medium.com  

Meet Swift Testing

Apple has officially announced an open-source swift-testing library — a significant improvement over XCTest. It all started last year when mentioned that I liked their new direction.

Apple has also shared a migration guide and a 27-minute Deep dive into Swift Testing.

PS. It doesn't replace XCUITest. It's for unit testing only, at least for now.

apple.com  

Ruff — The Fastest Python Linter for Playwright with Python

If you write your Playwright tests in Python, you might be interested in leveraging Ruff for code linting. Joan Alejandro Esquivel Montero explains how to do this in a 14-minute video.

youtube.com  

Just testing... 😂

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