Issue 19: We need to talk about testing
đ 5 MIN READ | Published on: August 2, 2021This is the Software Testing Notes, a newsletter that goes out every Wednesday. I republish it here for sharing and referencing, but if you'd like to sign up you can do so right here:
Hello everyone! đ
Iâm Pritesh and this is the 19th edition of Software Testing Notes, a weekly newsletter featuring must-read content on Software Testing. I hope this week has been good for you so far.
There are many tools out there to support your testing needs. Specifically, the test case management. This is all well and good but do you ever fill that you might be over doing it ? Nearly every aspect of software development and testing has some sorts of tools and tech to support it individually, which results in having/managing tons of tooling which can be a very difficult at times. So, I love it when someone finds a cool product hack.
For example, you use confluence for documentation and Jira to track individual development of stories, tasks etc. and another tool or plugins on top of Jira to manage and execute test cases and reporting.
This week I stumbled upon 2 intuitive way to utilize confluence and Jira which I would have never guessed.
First one is by James Thomas titled âOpen Testing with Confluence" where he explains how he uses the confluence pages to note down his testing process and attach relevant documents which others can take reference of. This is what we can use for the exploratory testing.
Second one is by poponuts about creating and managing test cases in Jira without the need of any plugin which is absolutely great on it self. Move over Zephyr, XRAY, TestRail... How to use JIRA itself as a test management tool. you need Jira administrator level privileges for this but this seems promising and worth trying it out. If you do try this, let me know how this is working out in the comments below or by hitting reply to this email.
In other news, folks over reddit are discussing What are the disadvantages of using test automation in a different language than what your app's built in? . Most common reason for supporting the same programming language so far is transferability of skills and reducing context shifts.
With that being said, Itâs time for our weekly round up of curated links. I have lots of nice reads for you this week, let me know what your favorite is!
Happy Testing and have a great rest of the week! đ
đ On Testing
5 tricks from 5 years as a software tester by Diogo Nunes
Diogo Nunes just finished his 5th year as a software tester. he has written about 5 common problems that he faced and how to solve it. A very neat, to the point and well written article.
We need to talk about testing by Daniel Terhorst-North
Why donât we just automate all the testing? Is test coverage a useful metric? What does it mean to âshift testing leftâ? When and where should we be testing? How much is enough testing?
Daniel Terhorst-North - the inventor of BDD, has put out an article with 4000+ words where he shares some of the discussions he had on testing over the years with developers and testers alike.
Important But Underestimated Soft Skills For Test Engineers by Natalija TakereÂ
Technical knowledge alone is not enough for Testers. Soft skills plays a huge role in advancing in any carrier including for software testers. Natalija Takere has put together a article summary based on a multiple research done to investigate the skills employers look for in software testers.
A very good compliment of this is SĂŠrgio Martinsâs article titled How I used communication to overcome 4 challenges as a test automation engineer.
What I learned from Mablâs State of Testing in DevOps report 2021 by Beth Marshall
Beth Marshall has put together a article with highlights of Mablâs State of Testing in DevOps report and discusses her thoughts on what she has learned from it.
Eight Signs Your Agile Testing Isnât That Agile by Blake Norrish
Testing is not a role, itâs an activity. Itâs an activity that everyone on a team should participate in. Even if you have a role on your Agile team with âqualityâ in the title (and I think you absolutely should!), they should not be the only ones who test.
When your testers are the gate keepers of your Quality. you are doing it wrong. Quality is never a sole responsibility of any tester but rather it should be a shared responsibility of the entire team. Blake Norrish shows some signs to detect whether a testing in your team is really a Agile or not.
Read all previously curated amazing articles, news on Software Testing here.
âď¸ Automation
Bad Spin â An Example of Ignoring the Automation Ecosystem by Paul Grizzaffi
A perfect take on why organizations tend to more focus âhowâ rather than âwhyâ ? This trend can be seen across the industry. Just because we have done X, we have to do the Y. Paul Grizzaffi highlights the importance of asking âwhy to automateâ rather than just focusing on âHow to automateâ.
Burn Cypress Tests on CircleCI by Gleb Bahmutov
How to run a single test multiple times by using cypress-grep and CircleCI pipeline
Wondering how you can determine the flakiness of your Cypress test ? Gleb Bahmutov shows us how we can run single cypress test multiple times in a row using cypress-grep plugin.
A another great addition to this is Running a Subset of Cypress Tests using Grep and Test Tags by Wir
End-to-End Testing and Feedback Loops by Andrei Rusu
This comes from Author/maintainer of Nightwatch JS itself. Andrei Rusu stresses on the need of having a Feedback Loops and how they integrate in the End to End testing and also provides some ways to shorten them.
Read all previously curated amazing articles, news on Automation here.
đ¨ Performance
Towards Inserting One Billion Rows in SQLite Under A Minute by Avinash Sajjanshetty
This is lit. Avinash had to insert ~100 million rows in the SQLite and boy did he came with a solutions đĽł. He writes about his experiments with Python and Rust with tweaking configuration parameters for SQLite and succeeding with it by writing ~1 Billion Rows of data in only ~33 seconds.
This can serve as a inspiration and be very useful for people looking for generating lodes test data for performance testing and functional tests as well.
Yogi Saputro did something similar with Node.js and PostgreSQL in a post titled âOptimizing Conditional Bulk Insert in Node.js + PostgreSQLâ
Monitoring serverless applications with AWS Cloud Watch alarms by Taavi Rehemägi
Thinking about setting up your Infrastructure monitoring with AWS Cloud Watch ? Taavi Rehemägi has got you covered.
Performance testing using locust with parallel requests by Sudarsan M
Get started with performance testing using Locust with this article by Sudarsan M with some basic use cases and examples.
Read all previously curated amazing articles, news on Performance here.
đĄď¸ Security
The Life Cycle of a Breached Database by Brian Krebs
I had always wondered why some apps donât allow re-using same passwords again. Now, I know why. This is not specifically related to the testing aspect but a great article to draw some useful cases for the security breaches and learn from it.
Read all previously curated amazing articles, news on Security here.
đ ď¸ Resources & Tools
Bug Hunter University :
A community of bug hunters powered by google to report the bugs for Google products. A great learning platforms for security testers.
Another JSON Schema Validator (AJV) :
Validate your API responseâs JSON Schema with this utility. Schema Validation is a great substitute for in-line response key assertions using Cypress & Chai.
Learn REST- A RESTful Tutorial :
Just getting started with API testing ? Learn everything there is to know about REST apis with the this opensource resource. Itâs dedicated to tracking REST API best practices and making resources available to enable quick reference and self education.
đ List of Software Testers
It's hard to find good articles, podcasts on Software Testing. Even hard to find people who create them. Are you also looking for amazing software testers to follow or read their content ? check out this page dedicated to software testers.
Do you also create content around Software Testing ? Submit yours here and I will add it to the list.
đ And Finally,
Hmm, It should work. Works on my machine. [ Comic strip by Corina Pip ]
Keep Smiling and have a fun week đ.
đ Reach Out
Let me know what you thought about this newsletter, maybe you have some ideas you'd like to share.
You can follow me personally @priteshusdadiya. I give insights into Testing, development & how I'm growing Software Testing Notes.
You can follow @thetestingkit to keep up-to-date on the community & fresh links to read.
Thanks so much for reading,
Pritesh
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