Navigating your QA career path

ISSUE 40 October 9th 2020

COMMENT

Welcome to the 40th issue!

Someone shared a nice story about their career progression from Manual QA to QA Management, and finally to Project Management.

This is a good reminder that we're free to choose our next path, whether it's within QA or outside of it.

And here's a great resource on navigating your QA career path by Melissa Eaden that may help you out.

But regardless of the choice you make, the most important ingredient of your growth is to never stop learning.

And my mission here is to help you learn more about QA every week.

So enjoy the read and see you next Friday!

Dawid Dylowicz

NEWS

How to Get Started with Mobile App Testing

I really liked this complete guide to mobile testing, covering everything from the very basics to details of iOS and Android platforms. Thanks, Vishal Gaikar!

medium.com

Test Strategy Templates

Rafaela Azevedo prepared five ready-to-go templates for setting a test strategy that I'm sure many of you will find useful. Great job!

azevedorafaela.com

Software Tester’s soft skills

Soft skills play a crucial role in software tester's job and I agree with every single one that Aneta Waligóra mentioned in this article.

Note: If you can't access the full article, simply open it in a private tab.

medium.com

Steps to move from Junior QA to Senior QA Engineer

While it's hard to come up with a universal recipe for advancing to a senior position, these pieces of advice from Hiyeran Doobay may surely help you set the right direction.

And for more tips, here's what experienced testers have to say to a brand new tester.

medium.com

Ways of Positive Remote Working For a Tester

Many of us may see remote software testing as a challenge (and rightly so) but it's thanks to articles like this one by Jon Welch that we can learn how to mitigate some of the risks. Great pieces of advice!

medium.com

What I've learned in my first professional year as a QA Engineer

These are some great tips shared by Felipe Cavalcanti after his first year as QA Engineer. I'm actually stunned how many valuable lessons he learned in such a short time!

medium.com

AUTOMATION

4 Ways to Handle Test Data for Your End-to-End Tests

Test data is as important as the test itself — no doubt about it. And here, Dennis Martinez gives the pros and cons of four ways to set up your test data. Helpful!

dev-tester.com

5 Common Mistakes in Test Automation

Test automation isn't trivial and mistakes are part of this game, but we can avoid some of them by learning from Gaurav Singh about the common problems he ran into when testing with Selenium.

testproject.io

Creating A Test Automation Portfolio Episode 5: UI Web Browser testing using Cypress

Beth Marshall continues her amazing series about helping you create a test automation portfolio. Last week it was about API, and this week it's about the UI, using JavaScript and Cypress.

beththetester.com

Machine Vision in Test Automation

This is a great example of how greatly AI can aid us in software testing. Snehal Akhouri describes how he and his team built their own image validator to monitor whether the app displays the right image or video, turning a dreadful manual task into an automation dream. Very insightful and very well done!

hotstar.com

Must ask Performance Engineering Questions

NaveenKumar Namachivayam provides us with a great set of questions regarding performance that a tester should ask the team before starting a project.

qainsights.com

TOOLS

Selenium 4 – New Features of Selenium WebDriver (Part 1)

Shama Ugale delights us with a thorough overview of some key features in upcoming Selenium 4, including code examples.

applitools.com

Testing FastAPI endpoints using fastapi.testclient

FastAPI is a very popular library for creating APIs in Python and this short guide, Rahul Bhave explains how to use it for testing, too.

qxf2.com

Why we chose Playwright over Cypress

It's always interesting to see the reasoning behind choosing one tool over the other in a real-world example, just like Tom Guppy did it here for Playwright and Cypress.

medium.com

BOOKS

Book review — Accelerate: Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations

Shouldn't we give Kristin Jackvony a special title of some sort for doing so many great reviews of software testing books? This one about Accelerate: Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations is no exception from her high standards!

thinkingtester.com