Welcome to the 64th issue!

Dave Verwer and his team have just published the results of the great iOS Dev Survey. But what interests me the most is the part about Testing and CI/CD on iOS.

First of all, this survey is mostly taken by iOS developers rather than testers, so keep that in mind when analysing the results.

Given that, I was surprised to find out that manual testing is valued as much or even more than automated testing. And only 0.9% of responders think it can be replaced by automated testing.

Having tested mobile apps for a few years myself, I agree with that. Automation can help immensely though it won't replace the human factor in exploratory testing or evaluating how the app feels like. But it's interesting to see such decisive statements from developers, too.

There are some other great insights in this survey, so I'd recommend checking it out if you're interested in testing on iOS.

Happy testing!

Dawid Dylowicz  

Mailsac — A Fast Email API for Testing

Do you want to write reliable email tests? Mailsac makes testing email seamless. Connect via API or WebSocket and get real-time JSON messages right in your tests. Fast, secure and reliable. Get started in minutes.

mailsac.com  

Contributing to Open Source in Quality Assurance

In this interesting article, Isabel Costa shares with us all the tips she learned from contributing to open-source projects as a software tester.

medium.com  

Decoupling Deployments from Releases: in Other People’s Words

If every code change can be deployed to production how can we possibly know if the end user experience will remain good?

This is an important question and I like that Areti Panou tried answering it by bringing up several views on this matter from multiple people.

unremarkabletester.com  

Do testers read research papers?

And if they do, then what type of? Balaji Santhanagopalan asked this question on LinkedIn and came to some interesting conclusions based on the comments he got.

synapse-qa.com  

Easy-to-understand usability testing examples for improving software product quality and user satisfaction

Here's a great article by Anna Kalemba explaining the importance of usability testing and giving practical tips on how to perform it well.

And a good complementary read on the matter is Julia Kocbek's explanation of how to refine your design with usability testing.

tsh.io  

Hiring a Software Tester, an Analysis

I really enjoyed this analysis of 107 CVs by Chris Kenst that not only tells us what the most common skills and practices are put on paper, but also what data can say about the unconscious bias in hiring software testers.

kenst.com  

Blockchain Tests with Truffle (Solidity)

Blockchain is slowly going mainstream so it's nice to see articles such as this one by Rafaela Azevedo that explains how to test it in Solidity language using the Truffle Suite tools.

azevedorafaela.com  

Contract Testing with Pact.io

Domenico Angilletta shares a lot of code examples in Ruby showing how to do API contract testing using Pact.

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

xing.com  

Guide to Conducting Test Automation Code Reviews

I agree with Angie Jones that test code should be treated like production code. So this great guide on doing code reviews for automated tests can surely help in achieving that.

applitools.com  

Test Flakiness — One of the main challenges of automated testing (Part II)

This is a great breakdown of possible test flakiness causes, supplemented by the triaging tips and potential fixes. By George Pirocanac from Google.

And you can also read the first part.

googleblog.com  

UI Testing using Page Object pattern in Swift

If you use the native XCTest framework for UI testing of iOS apps, here's a solid guide to Page Object pattern in Swift by Majid Jabrayilov.

swiftwithmajid.com  

What I've learned writing tests for someone else's code

As a test automation engineer, you may often find yourself writing tests for already existing code. Gil Zilberfeld gives some good pieces of advice on how to do it well.

everydayunittesting.com  

15 Top Load Testing Tools for 2021 (Open Source Guide)

Joe Colantonio gives a great overview of many open-source load testing tools by listing the key features and even linking to some podcasts that go more in-depth.

testguild.com  

An introduction to @testing-library: Part 1

Kieran Roberts shared a comprehensive introduction to the Testing Library — a popular open-source library for testing JS web apps that can be integrated with test frameworks such as Cypress, TestCafe and more.

kieranroberts.dev  

XPath tool SelectorsHub now supports Chromium, Brave, and Tor

Sanjay Kumar has just announced that SelectorsHub — the popular browser extension for selecting elements by XPath and CSS — now also works on Chromium, Brave, and Tor.

linkedin.com  

[London] Lead Mobile QA Engineer @ Smarkets

At Smarkets we are looking for a Lead Mobile QA Engineer. 75% of our staff are engineers, we re-write ~40% of the code base each year & we ship multiple times a day. This year we want to speed up the feature development of our Mobile apps. The role will incorporate lots of automation testing as well as exploratory testing through the apps.

smarkets.com  

Dev: It's ready for QA!

QA: ... 😂

Thanks for reading!

If you like what I'm doing and it helps you become a better tester, you can support my work and buy me a coffee.

Dawid Dylowicz