Happy New Year, and welcome to the 252nd issue! 🎉

And what's a better way to start the year than revisiting your career path?

For that, I want to highlight the SDET Career Roadmap: From Entry-level to Staff Engineer.

It's a wonderful resource from Gaurav Singh that can help you grow in your role.

Happy testing in 2025! 🙂

Dawid Dylowicz  

2025: AI in QA Predictions

AI has been rapidly evolving over the past couple of years. How is it going to impact testing going forward? Jason Arbon shares some interesting thoughts about it.

medium.com  

Joining a Team With No QA Processes

What should you do as the first QA in the team? Dennis Martinez shares several practical tips to get the best out of your role.

What may also help is the compilation of Functional Testing Best Practices by Experts by Govinda Solanki.

dev-tester.com  

Mitigating Risk In Complexity

Software systems are complex. Melissa Eaden outlines why that brings risks and how testers can help in reducing them.

And if you're wondering why it's important, Patrick Prill explains that Complex systems are bound to fail.

substack.com  

Testing Debt — It Exists and Hits Every Day in All Environments

We've all heard of technical debt, but what about testing debt? Ravisuriya Eswara explains what it is and how to recognise and manage it as a test engineer.

blogspot.com  

The Role of Software Test Automation Engineers in Dev Teams vs. Centralized QA Teams

Cagri Ataseven accurately points out the differences, including the benefits and challenges of working in each setup as a tester.

Similarly, Muhammad Syihab Rabbani Abdurrahim describes an insightful example of The Strategic Role of QA Engineers in Product Development at PrimaKu.

medium.com  

Design Patterns in Action: Part#4

Raj Uppadhyay continues the series of articles on the practical application of design patterns in test automation, this time demonstrating how this approach can help with migrating to another test framework.

In relation to that, Francesco Borzì wrote a comprehensive overview of Using the Page Object Model design pattern in Angular applications.

medium.com  

How I Built a Robust API Test Automation Framework with RestAssured

Based on their experience, Sinem Merve Ozdemir wrote a high-level guide to setting up a full API test automation framework, including CI and reporting. You can find the full code example on GitHub.

medium.com  

One More Technique to Avoid Timeouts as Fix of Flaky Tests

Andrey Enin offers useful advice on reducing web UI test flakiness by waiting for API calls to complete before taking action in the test.

Moreover, Irfan Mujagić describes Handling Caching in Automation Testing that can help with cleaning state before running consequent tests.

medium.com  

What are your pain points in Test Automation?

If you're curious about the test automation challenges other testers face in their day-to-day work, this handy page provides lots of examples and an insightful summary.

notion.site  

When (not) to automate tests

Test automation isn't always a one-size-fits-all approach. Katka Pilátová explains it well in this article, including several examples.

medium.com  

A beginner's guide to starting API testing with Playwright JS

Want to test APIs with Playwright? Team Merlin shared a detailed guide on how to set up the framework, implement tests and test reporting.

Furthermore, Sumit Soman wrote a handy Playwright's Guide to Mocking APIs & Network Traffic.

medium.com  

Deal With Flaky APIs From Cypress Tests

And if you write API tests using Cypress, you may want to follow these tips from Gleb Bahmutov on making them more stable.

Moreover, David Ingraham shares a few pieces of advice on leveraging Helpers in Cypress — When and Where to Use Them.

glebbahmutov.com  

Introduction to testing in Vitest

Vitest is a fairly recent test framework for JavaScript applications. Filip Hric shares his impressions in this handy, comprehensive overview.

filiphric.com  

LLM Based Android UI Testing — "Journeys with Gemini"

There's some exciting news coming from Android. They've recently featured a new way of writing UI tests leveraging AI called "Journeys with Gemini". Sam Edwards tells us more about it.

handstandsam.com  

Load Testing Made Easy with Grafana K6

Looking into implementing performance tests? Srinivas Nali wrote a detailed guide to k6 with examples.

medium.com  

Show Metadata in Playwright HTML Report: A Complete Guide

If you want to include more details in your Playwright test reports, Vitaliy Potapov found a way to achieve that with a hidden metadata feature.

dev.to  

Storybook + E2E Testing = 5x Faster way to test UI

In 30 minutes, Karthik K.K explains how you can use Playwright to test UI components created with the popular solution — Storybook.

youtube.com  

Making progress... 😂

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