Test Automation Interview 🤖

ISSUE 228 July 16th 2024

COMMENT

Welcome to the 228th issue!

Two weeks ago, I highlighted a great resource for preparing for a QA interview.

Today, I want to share with you two interesting discussions I found on preparing for a test automation interview:

In both threads, people talked about test automation coding tasks. Personally, I'm in favour of them, both as an interviewer and a candidate.

That's because they're a great opportunity to present your skills, as well as see what challenges you'd face in your new job.

Happy testing! 🙂

Dawid Dylowicz

NEWS

How Do You Go About Learning Complex Software As A Tester?

Someone asked a good question. After all, the effectiveness of testing is correlated to how much we know about the system under test. Here's some advice from the community on how to approach that. The discussion continues in this thread.

reddit.com

Last Call for Quality

Brienna Ransom explains the drawbacks of the traditional approach to QA at the end of the software development lifecycle and advises what shift-left practices are better suited nowadays. In relation to that, Brienna also shared an insightful Case Study of Testing Too Late.

Moreover, Dilbar Huseynzade highlights The Importance of Timing in QA process: Lessons from Figma's AI Design Feature Rollout.

substack.com

QA myth busting: Quality can be measured

Vitaly Sharovatov wrote a great article explaining why it's hard to measure quality and gives examples of several metrics that can be used as signals rather than measurements.

qase.io

Visual Models: cheat code for your memory

"A picture is worth a thousand words", goes the saying. Lena Pejgan Nyström describes several ways of visually representing data and models that can help testers in their day-to-day work.

pejgan.se

AUTOMATION

How to Stop Writing Tests That Suck

There's some great advice from Alec Barba on how to make your tests more purposeful and resilient.

Additionally, Mike Harris advises Using code reviews to have discussions about your test automation code.

medium.com

How we faced the problem of flaky tests

Test flakiness is one of the most common challenges in test automation. Here's how Bogdan Polianok and his colleagues approached this problem by building a custom solution to identify the flaky tests.

medium.com

SOLID Principles for Testers: The Interface Segregation Principle

Another month, another good article from Kristin Jackvony describing the SOLID principles for test automation. This time it's about "I" — the Interface Segregation Principle.

thinkingtester.com

Why you really need automated tests

Callum Akehurst-Ryan has some great points on the purpose of test automation, explaining why it's not an ultimate solution.

Also, Maaret Pyhäjärvi writes up: Test Automation — Friend or Foe?

cakehurstryan.com

XCUITest (iOS) Automation with POM Techniques

Page Object Model is a common pattern in test automation. Syeda Quratulain Asad shows how to implement it in a native test framework for iOS UI tests.

Furthermore, Fran Roig shows some good examples of Writing Clean and Maintainable XCUITests with Screen Chaining.

medium.com

TOOLS

A Simple and Effective E2E Test Architecture with Playwright and TypeScript

Wondering how you should design and structure your Playwright tests? Denis Skvortsov wrote a great overview with examples.

What's more, Matthew Thomas shows how to Detect and Handle Flaky Playwright Tests using the CTRF reporter.

linkedin.com

Building an AI Test Agent

What would it take to implement an AI test agent that would support testers in implementing all levels of the test pyramid? Here are some high-level insights from an Engineering Manager at Meta — Gunay Ozkan.

But let's not forget about the importance of Humans In SDLC, as Venkat Ramakrishnan reminds us.

medium.com

Detecting Duplicate XPath Locators with Puppeteer

If you face issues with duplicated XPath locators in your test scripts, Irfan Mujagić advises how to overcome that with Puppeteer.

thegreenreport.blog

How to simulate real BeforeAll and AfterAll in JUnit 5

JUnit 5 is a powerful Java test framework, but it lacks some features known from other tools. Elias Nogueira shows how to implement your custom version of beforeSuite and afterSuite.

Furthermore, Hardik Singh Behl advises on Reducing Testcontainers Execution Time with JUnit 5 Callbacks.

eliasnogueira.com

Streamlining GraphQL Service Testing with Karate

Testing GraphQL APIs? Armin Aminian demonstrates how they achieved that with the Karate test framework.

trivago.com

VIDEOS

9 Best Programming Languages for Test Automation

Every now and then I see people in testing communities asking about the best programming languages for implementing test automation. So it's helpful to see this 13-minute overview by Daniel Knott.

For example, here's what testers think about Mastering a Language then Selenium/Cypress and finally Playwright is the best way to learn Automation.

youtube.com