Doing first steps as a "test automation engineer"?
This article is for you! ❤️

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/first-most-important-step-road-test-engineer-ivan-karaman-ekqlc

Dive into the analysis that proves that paying for "test automation" education is worth the money you invest into it!

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/calculate-paying-test-automation-lessons-any-other-worth-ivan-karaman-td2yc/

This is why I love Twitter!
Sometimes you can get SO MUCH wisdom from a random post by reading replies...

Take this one from DHH:
| "HEY today has some 300-odd system tests. We're going to cut that number way down. The sunk cost fallacy has kept us running this brittle, cumbersome suite for too long. Time to cut our losses, reduce system tests to a much smaller part of the equation."
https://x.com/dhh/status/1791552150038024424

🤔What can we extract from the buzz in replies and quotes around it?
(...some screenshots and more links in comments...)

Friday afternoons are for the good reads!
I want to share with you one of my "all time favourite" articles ❤️

It is about "lemons"! 🤣

It explains a SURPRISING DYNAMICS of the hiring market! If you are looking for a job, or looking to hire somebody, reading this might be useful!

http://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/

How do you normally autotest an API? You write some custom code or create a Postman collection... But is it a) "the only way" and b) "the best way" of doing it? What if I tell you that you could test your API in the "end-to-end style" and the "unit-test style" (at the same time)!? 🤓 And that you could have ULTIMATE CONTROL over the inner behaviour!

Intrigued?
This article will show you a theory and a practical example of "how to do it".
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/testing-api-without-e2e-tests-node-express-supertest-example-karaman-uchec

Friday is for good reads! 😎
Here's an article for you called "Being Glue"! https://noidea.dog/glue
This is another one of my favourites of all times! ❤️

TLDR In case you have never seen/read it: "To not harm your career do (mostly) the work that is expected from your role/title"

I am on fire this week in terms of writing productivity! So much that I Just published a new article 🔥
It is a practical step-by-step guide on how to make improvements to your test code!

I take a simple API test and do 10 rounds of improvements on it.

What is your opinion, is it better now, same, or worse? 🤔
Fight me in the comments (in a civilized manner, of course) if you don't like it!

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/practical-step-by-step-guide-improving-your-test-code-ivan-karaman-blhbc/

This is a cool article measuring flakiness of "Cypress vs Playwright".
It might be helpful for you if you are trying to decide on the "next framework to use at work"

TLDR: Playwright is LESS flaky
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cypress-vs-playwright-flakiness-analysis-andrew-goldis-kuquc

FRIDAY IS FOR THINKING!
Found cool visualisation on "why accidents happen". Picture is about life in general, so the content quite easily be transferred to the "software development process".

If you slice real cheese and leave it on the plate, all of the big air bubbles will NATURALLY be aligned. If the developer does all the testing, they will MORE LIKELY to create problems (shared cheese bubble)!

If you add other people, aka diversify, you would REDUCE THE LIKELIHOOD of problems:
- another developer doing tests differently (rotate/flip the layer)
- PR review process
- independent testing
- monitoring/observability
- ...etc.

What are your thoughts?
For those with no Twitter/X account, screenshot inside (just in case)
https://twitter.com/sketchplanator/status/1798594426291273963

First real attempt in making short videos after a long break! I got tired of producing "Standard YouTube format" some time ago and was dormant! 😅

What are your thoughts?
https://www.tiktok.com/@ivanandcode/video/7377957578350906642

Do you want a little challenge?
OF COURSE YOU DO!
I present to you a game called "Petals Around the Rose".

Rules are simple, you need to guess the pattern! This is a good example of exploratory testing: "do -> observe -> conclude -> repeat"
My result will be in comments, feel free to share yours! 😜

(do not google the answer or a game name, it will ruin the fun)
https://mshakerinava.github.io/Petals-Around-the-Rose/

A little glimpse into the future! 🔮
I have created a course!

It's called: "Minimum Viable JavaScript - programming foundations"
It's not live yet, I plan to release it publicly some time next week.

Main areas are covering the following “howtos”:
- get started
- test your code
- continue learning on your own

And I have a LIMITED AMOUNT of free coupons available (o-la-la!)! So if you are learning JavaScript (or feel like a beginner in it) leave a comment “yassss!!” and I will grant you the wish when it goes live 🧙

Friday is time for good reads!🤪

In case you haven't seen it, here's a good "overview" article about QA in the industry.
Unfortunately, it is a paid one, so you won't be able to see it in full, but even a free part worth a read:
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/qa-across-tech

Very relatable video... Scrum is often sucking your soul out and more people need to talk about it!

Unfortunately, there is no solution on the horizon (yet)😅
https://youtu.be/gSVBWvoNJ-s?si=Tce_VYytxCV6Th98

A small update!
Last week I've been a panellist on the NZ Testing Conference in Wellington. https://nztestingconf.nz/
The topic was: "Career planning and progression for QAs in the NZ".

I Had a great time answering the questions! So great in fact, that the event photographer made A LOT of photos of me.
Seemed meme enough so I made a telegram stickerpack! (pictures in comments)

Not 100% sure if this is useful, but it looks like an "interesting enough" find, so...
Some of the interview questions asked for "QA" in Amazon/Google/IBM/Oracle
https://prepare.sh/engineering/quality-assurance/company/all

I can see that a lot of them are either about engineering (likely for SDET/automator kind of roles) or generic (for manual/explorers).
Keep in mind that:
- age of the questions is unknown (might be way obsolete)
- there is no verification that they are actually legit (scraped over the internet)
So take it with a grain of salt... however, it might be helpful if you are preparing for a round of interviews!😎

If you are learning JavaScript, this thread might be helpful: https://x.com/thewizardlucas/status/1575147326468915200

Simple explanation of what is the purpose of the package-lock.json👏

Can you measure the quality?
Really? This is a great article about "measuring quality" by Vitaly Sharovatov and Rease Rios.
https://qase.io/blog/qa-myth-busting-quality-can-be-measured/

TLDR: use metrics, but only as an indicator, as a signal that something is "great or not quite right" with quality.

A great analogy used by the article authors (and they repeat this analogy several times as the reasoning progresses)

Let’s go back to the family road trip. You, the driver, have a destination (project completion) and planned stops (project milestones). Let’s say you made all the planned stops and made it to your destination. That would add up to a high quality road trip, right? No, because quality is not measured by getting to the destination, but rather the experience along the way. Let’s say one passenger got food poisoning, you spent several hours stranded with a flat tire, and a hotel at one of the planned stops lost your reservation so you had to sleep in the car one night. Would you still perceive that as a quality road trip?

Give it a read, it is worth it! 😍👍

This is an amazing collection of the "testing playground" resources!
Bookmark it!

A curated list of sites to practice testing on

https://github.com/BMayhew/awesome-sites-to-test-on

Lately, I have been thinking about "THE WAY" of adding testers/QAs to the company.

Is there a best team composition? Embedded or separate? Specialists or generalists?

This article looks into this question from the "Small product tech company" perspective and outlines 6 possible options to choose from.
Of course, everything is complex and "IT DEPENDS"!
But do you agree with my choice? 😋

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/where-does-tester-belong-team-topologies-ivan-karaman-nozvc