Welcome to the 72nd issue!

Big news! Microsoft has officially announced that Internet Explorer will ultimately die in 2022.

They already gave us some early signals last summer when they sunset IE11 for its core Microsoft 365 service (which I briefly celebrated in the 33rd issue.)

The thing is, we've stopped many releases, we've applied many hotfixes, we've also increased many metrics tracking the number of bugs. All these thanks to IE.

For the good and for the bad, now it's the champagne time! 🍾

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  

Automated testing vs. manual testing: efficient co-living

The discussion about automated vs manual testing is never-ending. But I like how Natallia Pleshkun recognised that in the real world, a balance between the two is needed more than ever.

medium.com  

Bug Report: Applying the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) and KISS

Bug reporting shouldn't be complicated. Ravisuriya Eshwara gives a tip on how you can apply the well-known principles from programming to keep it simple and effective.

And if you want to have a more in-depth read about bugs, check out Bashiul Alam Sabab's guide to the Bug Lifecycle and Bug Reporting.

blogspot.com  

How to improve Questioning skills

Asking good questions is one of the best skills a tester can have. OK, but how do you learn that? Good question!Shrinivas Kulkarni has some great insights.

blogspot.com  

Testers Need to Read Code

Maaret Pyhäjärvi says that testers should be able to read developer's code. Why? Simply to improve your testing capabilities and increase cooperation with the development team.

blogspot.com  

When Software Bugs Are Literally Fatal

Testing mission-critical software isn't trivial. But so isn't testing normal software. Doug Foo explains the big failures and comes to a conclusion that regardless of what we test, there are no silver bullets.

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

medium.com  

5 Questions Developers Ask About Test Automation Best Practices

In the final part of the very interesting series, Katya Aronov shares some great practices for test automation.

And if you want to read more, you might be interested in Dennis Martinez's recent piece on 5 Ways to Speed up Your End-to-End Tests.

medium.com  

Test tasks for automation engineers: do we need them?

This is something for leaders or managers who recruit Test Engineers. Oleksandr Romanov explains how to design a clever test automation task that can evaluate a candidate on many levels.

github.io  

How to build a CI/CD pipeline — with examples

Here's a decent guide to building a CI/CD pipeline by Deepak Singh Dhami. Kudos for clearly explaining the concept and listing out a variety of tools for each stage.

techtarget.com  

Writing Table-Driven Tests

Data-driven (or table-driven) tests come in particularly handy when you need to repeat the same test for various input data combinations. Brad Olson shows how to implement it with Jest.

medium.com  

Testing Your Website for Visual Regressions With BackstopJS

Visual regression testing can help spot unwanted changes. Mattsi Jansky wrote a step-by-step guide with examples of setting up and running such tests using BackstopJS and Docker.

dev.to  

Healenium: Self-Healing Library for Selenium-based Automated Tests

Self-healing Selenium tests? Now, that's interesting! Anton Angelov gives us an overview of Healenium — an open-source tool designed to help maintain stable tests.

automatetheplanet.com  

How to Choose Bug Tracking Software: Jira and Its Alternatives

Looking for a bug tracking tool? Anna Senchenko did a great job comparing six various tools and describing in detail their pros and cons.

qamadness.com  

Ultimate JMeter Kubernetes Starter Kit

Here's an amazing guide by Romain Billon to running performance tests at scale with JMeter on Kubernetes.

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

faun.pub  

Your 80 Questions about Playwright, Answered

If you're wondering whether Playwright is a good choice for your test automation project, Andrey Lushnikov — one of Playwright developers — answered 80 (!) questions that can help you decide. Quite an interesting way to learn more about a tool, I must say!

applitools.com  

Lessons Learned in Software Testing

Lessons Learned in Software Testing is a popular book, often mentioned as one of the must-reads for software testers. If you haven't read it yet, this overview by Klaudia Dziubek may help in convincing you.

testingtraveler.com  

Dirty Tests and How to Clean Them

If you're interested in writing cleaner test automation code, Gil Zilberfeld prepared an insightful presentation that explains the concept's key features and backs them up with several examples.

everydayunittesting.com  

[Remote / New York] Senior Software Engineer — Quality & Internal Tools @ Attune

Attune is looking for our first Senior Quality & Internal Tools Engineer, responsible for building and shipping quality tools. We're a quickly growing and well-funded insurtech company, using technology to provide small businesses with insurance policies quickly and easily.

grnh.se  

Nothing to see here, just a tester doing its job... 😂

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