Welcome to the 20th issue of Software Testing Weekly!

It's been an amazing 20-week journey of delivering you only the best software testing news and I can only hope for more! Thank you very much for subscribing, reading and getting in touch. It means a lot to me and to the authors of those great resources that I link to every single week. 🙌

Someone asked on Reddit whether Selenium is dead. The post got a few answers and the general feeling is that no — it's not dead. Selenium is one of the best known and longest supported web testing tools with a chance of becoming a W3C standard. However, in recent years there was a rise of modern JavaScript-based testing tools — Cypress, TestCafe and Playwright to name a few. But it doesn't mean one has to replace the other. It's a healthy competition that gives us more high-quality tools that we can choose from. Just remember, as a tester your primary focus is to select the tool wisely, according to the problem at hand. Despite Jeremy Clarkson's belief, a hammer is not the ultimate tool. 😊

From other news, Zerodium — a company that pays out big money for finding software exploits — has recently announced that it's going to stop buying the iOS exploits due to oversupply. Yes, you read correctly. iOS 13 has been very buggy and it looks like the security researchers confirm this case. As an iOS user, I find the news disturbing. I don't expect Apple to publicly reply but I hope for the best response they can give — make the next version of iOS stable and secure. And with their new development process, this is likely to come.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Dawid Dylowicz  

60 great resources for performance engineering teams

A great list of performance engineering resources prepared by Joe Colantonio. Be it books, tools, articles, podcasts or experts — you'll find them all well described in one place. Kudos!

techbeacon.com  

Do we all need to become SDITs?

Automation has been trending for years — but does it mean that the only way forward for testers is to acquire more technical skills? Callum Akehurst-Ryan shares his view on the Software Developers In Test role, discussing what the market demands and what skills testers are likely to need.

wordpress.com  

How a Tester can make a Developer’s life easier

I'm always curious about non-tester's point of view on software testing. This time, Damian Modernell — an iOS software engineer by profession — shares his perspective on how the QA and Dev collaboration can be more fruitful, especially when it comes to remote work. We, testers, can definitely learn from that.

medium.com  

Pair Testing

I always find pairing on testing insightful, especially with people from other areas, such as product managers or developers. In this article, Adebayo Adegunloye explains in a clear way what Pair Testing is and why it's beneficial.

And if you're looking for practical tips on remote pair testing, this article by Steven Burton may help.

medium.com  

Testers/QAs should not be Gatekeepers

This is a good reminder from Tom Hudson on why being a gatekeeper as a tester is not the best idea. And an equally good piece of advice on what to do instead. I agree 100%.

medium.com  

How Your Organisation Predicts Your CI/CD Pipeline

This caricatural view of CI/CD pipeline types, presented by Forrest Brazeal, is scaringly accurate to what you can see across various projects and teams. Great read, really enjoyed that!

acloud.guru  

Using Multiple Test Frameworks Simultaneously

Using an all-in-one testing tool might be tempting at first but in the long-term it can bring more nightmares than sweet dreams. Here, Andrew Knight gives a few solid pieces of advice on using multiple test frameworks in the same project.

automationpanda.com  

Adding more stability to your Cypress Tests

These are some great tips and code snippets from Marie Drake that can help make your Cypress tests more stable. Thanks for that!

mariedrake.com  

Shard your Android Espresso tests for faster execution in parallel

Speeding up test execution is always highly wanted by any software testing engineer. In this article, Doug Stevenson shows how to use sharding for parallel execution of Android Espresso tests.

medium.com  

Cypress Sapling — Cypress repository with all essential tools for testing

Diogo Nunes extracted the best bits of the test repo that he used in his last project and put together the ready-to-go cypress-sapling package. Handy for getting started with Cypress while having all the essential tools ready out of the box!

github.com  

Unit test React components using Cypress

This package allows you to use Cypress test runner to easily unit test your React components that run in a real browser.

It was created by Gleb Bahmutov, based on his interesting vision for testing React components. If you find the project useful and want to help Gleb in making it even better, he's asking for feedback in this survey.

github.com  

Agile Conversations: Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture

This is a brand new book on Agile by Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick that has been released just 10 days ago.

If you're wondering whether it's something you should read, Kristine Casas has already shared a short review and the key takeaways in this article.

goodreads.com  

Agile Testing — Chapter 6

I've read the Agile Testing book twice, and while I like all of these concise reminders from Nishi Grover Garg, this one about The Four Testing Quadrants is one of my favourite parts of the book — and one of the most important ones.

testwithnishi.com  

Tester's way to answer a simple question... 😂