Welcome to the 53rd issue!

Last week I received some absolutely amazing feedback from you on LinkedIn and Twitter. Thank you very much for that. It's proof that Software Testing Weekly delivers value and I'm proud of what we achieved so far. And I just want you to know that I'm very happy that you're a part of it.

Now, over the past two weeks, I've seen many great summaries of 2020 from software testing bloggers and I want to give a shout-out to this particular one that stood out the most — Testing in 2020, according to my Twitter bookmarks by Gregory Paciga.

I really liked how Greg summarised the year with his favourite Twitter bookmarks which, as a whole, turn into an inspirational read on software testing and beyond.

Happy testing!

Dawid Dylowicz  

Discover the Best Automation Testing Strategies from the World’s Top Experts

Want to know how to avoid creating flaky automated tests in 2021? Join the 5th Annual Automation Guild Feb 8-12 — an online conference and community that will help YOU succeed with your automation testing efforts. Discover actionable tips, tools, techniques & best practices from over 30 top testing experts. Register online to accelerate your tests and your career!

guildconferences.com  

My experience as a Quality Engineering Manager — 5 takeaways

There are some great pieces of advice on QA Management described here by Parker Ferguson. And since I led a QA process myself, I find it very relatable.

medium.com  

4 Things Worth Including in a Bug Report (and 5 free tools)

There are many resources on how to write a bug report on the Internet but not many of them explain it in a simple way with examples like this one by Eric Skinner.

medium.com  

Creating a Testing Portfolio (Non-Automation)

The process of building a test automation portfolio is straightforward — you implement solutions for some projects and put it on Github. But what about all the other things outside of automation that you can show? Johanna South gives some great pieces of advice.

theqaconnection.com  

Testing Blockchain Applications

I've been running this newsletter for over a year now and I haven't found many decent articles on blockchain testing yet. But here's one now by Rafaela Azevedo and it explains the concept very well!

azevedorafaela.com  

Quality as a Team Responsibility

I like the feature acceptance process in form of shoulder-checks that Kelly Chin described here. I used a similar approach before, replacing a meeting with a pull request that couldn't be merged unless approved by a QA, a designer and another developer.

medium.com  

We need to stop using white/black box testing categorisation

This is one of the articles that makes you stop and question the status quo. And that's good — we need such thought-provoking reads to keep improving our testing processes. Thanks, Noemi Ferrera.

wordpress.com  

Are we solving the right problems in test automation? Part 1

In this excellent piece, Bas Dijkstra explains why the pursuit of making test automation easier by inventing more and more low-code tools is not necessarily the best path to follow. And why investing in software development skills matters more than ever.

ontestautomation.com  

Automation Testing Trends 2021 — Top 10 Predictions

I've found many "trends for 2021" articles recently but this one about automation testing by Joe Colantonio is the one I feel the most aligned with. Especially when it comes to Accessibility and Observability concepts, as well as the Playwright tool.

testguild.com  

10 Good Practices in Selenium C# Automation

Andreea Draniceanu shared this full of examples list of tips for improving test automation in Selenium. Although the examples are in C#, I see no reason why it couldn't be applied to other popular programming languages.

testproject.io  

Distributed Test Reporting using ELK stack

Here's a great, detailed guide by Sérgio Martins on how to build your own test reporting dashboard using Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana.

medium.com  

Yet Another Tests Automation Case Study

In this insightful story, Viktor Terinek shares how they set up multi-level test automation from scratch, backed up by real examples.

medium.com  

AI-based Test Automation Tools — Challenges and Obstacles

I liked the fact that Iryna Suprun shared a very realistic view of what it means to deal with AI testing tools. There's also a handy comparison of some of them at the end of the article.

medium.com  

Cypress vs. Selenium: Which is the Superior Testing Tool?

Although I reckon that superiority of tools depends on the problem we're trying to solve, this article by Sandra John includes a nicely done comparison that can help you understand when to use one over the other.

cuelogic.com  

Book Review: Leading Quality

Kristin Jackvony reviewed 12 books related to software testing in the past 12 months and here's the latest one about Leading Quality. This has been a great contribution to the software testing community so far and I don't know about you but I'm very thankful for that!

thinkingtester.com  

The Software Testing Fuzzing Book

Fuzzing is still a rather niche concept of software testing but if you like to experiment and find new ways to test, you might find The Fuzzing Book (by Andreas Zeller and others) an interesting position to read.

softwaretestingmagazine.com  

QA TechTalks inspirational videos

Vinayak Titti came up with a brilliant idea to ask testers for a 3-minute inspirational video about software testing, which resulted in a playlist of nearly 40 videos on various topics.

youtube.com  

What you hear when you report a bug... 😂