Welcome to the 36th issue!

I truly believe that software tester's role is continuously evolving and we need to keep learning new skills to stay relevant in our field.

Inspired by Marie's article (see below), I believe that one of the great ways to do it is the collection of 30 Days of Testing challenges from Ministry of Testing.

So if you're planning on starting one, let me know on Twitter or LinkedIn as I'll be happy to follow your journey.

Until next week!

Dawid Dylowicz  

30 Days Of Accessibility Testing — Part 1

If you're not very familiar with accessibility testing, this summary of Marie Drake's first 15 days of accessibility testing challenge is a great place to start. I must admit it inspired me (as you can see in the comment above)!

mariedrake.com  

An end-to-end guide to Exploratory Testing

In this great guide, Johanna South explains everything about exploratory testing and shows how to test and have fun at the same time. I especially liked the role-playing part!

theqaconnection.com  

About agile recruitment, agile organizations and employees trying to keep up

You might have noticed that we work in an agile-everything environment nowadays and Kinga Witko shares her thoughts on this movement and what implications it has for us and the companies we work for.

wordpress.com  

Testing Metrics: Are You Really Sure about the Quality of Your Product?

There's a lot to learn from this comprehensive overview of various software testing metrics by Andrey Ostapenko where he describes what type of metrics can be used and how they can be measured using various formulas and analytics.

medium.com  

The most important soft skill of a tester

To make things clear, many soft skills play a huge role, but I agree with Andrejs Doronins that the one he describes here is crucial for software testers. One will not get far without it, for sure.

PS. If you can't access the full article, simply open the link in a private tab.

medium.com  

Avoid These 3 Mistakes With Your End-To-End Tests

Dennis Martinez gives some solid practical advice on how to avoid the three common mistakes in test automation. Better safe than sorry!

dev-tester.com  

Hey Kids, keep away from Cucumbers

I liked this story by Marek Siemieniuk-Morawski about choosing Cucumber for his first test automation project and what he learned from that.

medium.com  

How to Build a Test Automation Strategy?

In this high-level overview, Vlad Ershov shows a step-by-step journey of choosing the right test automation strategy, including information on what to do and what tools you can potentially use.

medium.com  

How to write self-healing functional API tests with no coding effort

Wouldn't it be great to have auto-generated API tests?! It might be possible now with the open-source tool called CATs that Madalin Ilie describes in this article. All you need is to define your API using the OpenAPI specification. I really like the idea!

github.io  

Making Test Frameworks Readable: The Domain Specific Language

Bas Dijkstra explains why and how you can make your test framework easier to use by implementing a custom Domain Specific Language. The examples, the pros and cons and the idea behind it are all well explained in there.

PS. If you can't access the full article, simply open the link in a private tab.

medium.com  

QAide — Test Step Recorder for Chrome

Reece Harbour has recently released a tool for recording test steps in Chrome. It looks promising as it may be an interesting alternative to Selenium IDE.

google.com  

SeleniumBase — end-to-end web UI tests in Python

SeleniumBase is an open-source Selenium wrapper for Python with features such as automated spinning up of browsers, screenshots on failure and advanced test reports.

If you're planning on trying it out, you might be interested in Pablo Calvo's concept of test automation framework architecture with SeleniumBase.

seleniumbase.io  

If it works, it works. 😂