Welcome to the 89th issue!

This week, I found an interesting thread on Reddit asking software testers:

What's the worst mistake you've ever made?

It's a great read for two reasons:

1. The advice on not taking the blame personally.
2. The actual screw-ups.

Happy testing!

PS. Due to an arm injury, I've hired a technical writer to help me polish the descriptions for this issue, most of which I had previously captured using the brilliant speech-to-text Drafts app.

Dawid Dylowicz  

Write Easy Email Integration Tests with Mailsac API

Do you test email integration using UI? That's neither fast, reliable nor secure. Try Mailsac API to easily test sending and receiving emails in the blink of an eye. Just copy-paste this code to get started.

mailsac.com  

69.3%, OK?

Have you ever been asked about what percentage of your test cases are automated? James Thomas raised a few good points on why this question isn't valid.

In a similar fashion, Vladimir Tiulenev shared his opinion about measuring Test Coverage.

blogspot.com  

Let's Charm Our Teams With Charisma Testing

Callum Akehurst-Ryan describes a very interesting concept of Charisma Testing — a technique where instead of looking for flaws, you focus on the good things.

wordpress.com  

Quality Leadership: Influence through Informal Leadership

What an important article! A lot has been said about how soft skills can help software testers but here Jess Ingrassellino focuses specifically on how to increase your influence within the team to become an informal leader.

applitools.com  

The Day To Day Of A Software Test Engineer

Wondering how a typical day of a tester looks like? Although it may differ from role to role, Jolivé Hodehou captured the essence.

Also, Senuri Samindi elaborated a bit more about the differences between The role of Test Manager vs. the role of Tester.

medium.com  

The Power of Three Plans

Whether in life or in testing, it's always good to have a few plans. Maaret Pyhäjärvi shares 3 of them: a one-page test plan, a test strategy plan and a test environments plan.

blogspot.com  

A case against Page Object Model — Part 2

What's wrong with the Page Object Model? Eldad Uzman once again brings up some valid ideas and examples proving his point. You can also read Part 1 that mentioned two weeks ago.

Additionally, Murat Ozcan gives an amazing explanation of why Page Object is not the ultimate solution, using multiple examples from Functional Test Patterns with Cypress.

medium.com  

APIs Unleashed 07: Data-Driven Testing

Continuing the great series on API testing, Pricilla Bilavendran and Priyanka Brahmane show you how to use the data-driven test approach for one of its best use cases — APIs. They used popular tools, such as Postman and Karate, as an example.

synapse-qa.com  

DRY or Don’t Repeat Yourself in Test Automation — Part 3

In this concise article, Han Toan Lim shares an example of using the DRY principle for designing and refactoring automated tests.

mindfultester.com  

How we built better automated UI testing at Vimeo

Interested to learn how Vimeo tests their UI? Andrew Katsikas reveals some of the practices and tools they use.

Furthermore, you might be also interested in Cesar Lugo's story about the Adoption of engineering standards at Typeform.

medium.com  

If you mock, are you even testing?

How do you decide whether you should write unit, integration or end-to-end tests? Nicolas Carlo shares some great pieces of advice on how and when to implement each of them,

In a similar context, Jaswanth Manigundan wrote about his Recent Obsession with Hermetic Tests for mobile.

understandlegacycode.com  

To automate or not to automate your tests?

It's important to strike a balance between manual and automated tests. Simon Knight gives a few great tips on how to decide when to do which.

Similarly, Eduardo Fischer wrote about Test Automation: Always The Approach Of First Resort?.

sjpknight.com  

Performance testing in Postman

Postman is a very versatile tool and Maciej Seleman shows how you can implement a custom script for running load tests and even export the results to create a graph.

brightinventions.pl  

Power of the k6: Observability of the Databases

Yusuf Tayman wrote a clear article demonstrating how to use k6 for performance testing of databases. Looks simple!

medium.com  

Top Android Testing Frameworks You Need to Know

Looking for a UI testing tool for Android? Harish Rajora put together a list of six and listed out the pros and cons of each.

Additionally, Junaid Ahmad presents how to use the Kakao tool to Write First UI Test in Android.

testproject.io  

Using TestContainers for Integration Testing inside Microservice/API

If you use Java, you might be interested in Guilherme Rogatto's overview of TestContainers that can help you set up the whole testing environment on Docker.

medium.com  

WebDriverManager 5: Automated driver management and Docker builder for Selenium WebDriver

The new version of WebDriverManager 5 — the open-source library for managing Selenium in Java — has been recently released and Boni García describes the key changes in this major release. You can also have a look at the changelog.

medium.com  

Book Review — The Hitchhiking Guide To Load Testing Projects

NaveenKumar Namachivayam gives an excellent overview of The Hitchhiking Guide To Load Testing Projects book about load testing by Leandro Melendez.

qainsights.com  

Testim — Fast and flexible authoring of AI-powered end-to-end tests, built for scale

Your dynamic web application needs test automation that keeps pace. Testim’s fast authoring with code flexibility boosts coverage, AI-powered stability slashes maintenance, and TestOps helps scale your team and testing efficiently. START TESTING FOR FREE.

bit.ly  

When life gives you bugs... 🤣

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