Welcome to the 103rd issue!

I hope you'll have a wonderful time this holiday season.

And while slowly planning the next year, you might be also interested in The Best Online and In-Person Software Testing Events in 2022.

Also, here's another list of the Software Testing Conferences in 2022.

Happy testing! 🎄

Dawid Dylowicz  

A Really Useful List For Exploratory Testers

If you want to learn about exploratory testing, Simon Tomes put together a great list of high-quality resources that can help you master your skills.

ministryoftesting.com  

A tester’s critique of "The 2021 State of Software Quality: The View from Enterprise Leaders & Followers"

There have been a lot of reports about software testing published over the year. Lee Hawkins took a closer look at one of them and pointed out some interesting findings.

wordpress.com  

Keeping testing up to speed with development

How do you keep up with testing when the development team scales? Jonathan Welch shares a few practices that can help.

Also, sometimes you need to Helping Developers and Testers Get Along, as Dennis Martinez explains.

medium.com  

QA — the fire safety specialist for your project

In this article, Vladimir Solodov put together a valuable list of software tester's responsibilities in a project and a team.

medium.com  

Testability Advocacy Canvas

Good testability is something that every team should aim for. Ash Winter shares a handy canvas that can help you improve it in your place.

diagramindustries.com  

Automate End-to-end testing in large-scale enterprise software

Finn Fiedler lists out the common challenges in end-to-end testing and shows a few examples that solve them in one way or another.

dev.to  

Avoiding hard waits

Here's great advice from Tim Nolet on why it's so important to avoid hard waits and rely on a smarter approach instead. It also includes examples using Puppeteer and Playwright tools.

Similarly, Sajitha Pathirana explains why not to use hard assertions everywhere.

dev.to  

Test Automation Framework (Selenium with Java) — Fear or Code Review and Refactoring (Part 1)

Continuing the great series of articles about building your own Java test automation framework based on Selenium, Tomasz Buga shares how to perform the code review and refactoring of your test based on feedback.

medium.com  

Use a fake server (not only) for testing your UI

Robert Banaszak wrote a very comprehensive guide to setting up a fake server to improve the stability of UI tests, including the pros and cons of this solution. There are plenty of great examples as well.

hashnode.dev  

UI tests vs. snapshot tests on Android: which one should I write?

Sergio Sastre Florez explains the advantages and disadvantages of each approach and explains why a healthy mix of both is the key to success in mobile UI automation.

hashnode.dev  

Why Should Software Testers Understand Unit Testing?

As you probably know, unit tests are at the foundation of the test pyramid. Although they're usually owned and implemented by developers, Jess Ingrassellino points out why it's important for software testers to get involved, too.

applitools.com  

Handling API with Cypress

Cypress is capable of testing web UI as well as API. Here's a nice overview of the latter by Areesha Altaf.

medium.com  

Selenium vs X, Y, Z, …, all these years

This is a very interesting article from Zhimin Zhan explaining why Selenium has stood the test of time compared to other tools.

And if you want to learn more, Vasista Thiruveedi gives a solid overview of the Selenium 4 New Features with Practical Examples.

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

medium.com  

Which test case manager would you use if you had a choice?

If you're wondering what test case management tools testers prefer to use, here are the results of the recent poll on Reddit.

reddit.com  

How To Switch From Manual to Automation Testing?

In the last week's issue, I've mentioned Kelly Chin's article about lessons learned from moving from manual to automation testing. Here's some additional context from Pramod Dutta.

youtube.com  

A Tester's Christmas Song... 🎅

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