Issue #218 : Software Testing Notes
The Test Automation Debt Nobody Tracks
Hello there! 👋
Welcome to the 218th 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.
This week, we will explore:
API Tests – Rent You Don’t Need to Pay
Selective Test Execution at Stripe
Lessons from building an AI Testing System
PulsePost: A Tiny Load Tester
The quirky little bug that taught me a valuable testing lesson3
and more…
✨ Featured
How QA Teams Are Using AI to Generate API Tests 10x Faster
If you write API tests, the slow part is the setup: reading the Swagger spec and hand-coding scaffolding before you can assert anything. You’ll watch an Amazon SDET and BrowserStack’s QA manager use AI agents and MCP workflows to turn a real spec and Jira tickets into the full suite, then keep flaky failures out of the build with self-healing and let AI sort a real failure from a flaky one.
📚 Testing
The quirky little bug that taught me a valuable testing lesson by Ady Stokes
Ady Stokes tells a story starting with a seemingly trivial postcode field bug and turns into a lesson about the assumptions testers bring to everyday work.
Testing = slow? Yeah, that's by design, you dipshit. by Maaike Brinkhof
Maaike Brinkhof has written about very real issues with industry’s obsession with speed and arguing that meaningful testing is inherently slow because its purpose is to uncover risk, not rubber stamp releases.
Thinking in threes about software testing by Joep Schuurkes
Joep Schuurkes borrows ideas from magic, philosophy, and systems thinking to challenge the software testing and shows fresh perspectives on testing by asking what lies outside the usual either-or debates.
With Claude: Less Coding, More Testing by Henrik Warne
Henrik Warne takes a grounded look at how coding agents are reshaping day-to-day software development, shifting effort from writing code toward understanding, reviewing, and testing it.
API Tests – Rent You Don’t Need to Pay by Kevin Roe
Kevin Roe makes a persuasive case that many so-called API tests are really integration tests running in the wrong place, adding cost and delay without adding confidence.
I Stopped Rebuilding My QA Context Every Session. Here Is the System I Built Instead. by Jaren Charles Cudilla
Jaren explores what happens when QA workflows are formalized into AI-assisted systems, separating repeatable testing tasks from the human judgment that makes testing valuable.
🔍 Software Testing
⚙️ Automation
The Test Automation Debt Nobody Tracks by Swati Seela
Test automation can accumulate its own form of debt without us realizing it until it becomes too late. Swati Seela shares a useful reminder that the value of automation isn’t measured by coverage or test count, but by how reliably it delivers feedback that people actually trust.
Selective Test Execution at Stripe: Fast CI for a 50M-line Ruby monorepo by Aditya Anchuri
This is a fascinating deep dive by Aditya Anchuri into how Stripe keeps a massive Ruby codebase moving by running only the tests that are likely to be affected by a change, rather than the entire suite.
How to Test External API Calls in FastAPI Applications Using Requests-mock and Pytest-httpx by Viacheslav Koniukhov
Viacheslav Koniukhov challenges a common testing habit in Python services such as mocking HTTP methods directly and advocates for mocking the external service itself using tools like requests-mock and pytest-httpx.
Ollama Playwright Test Data Generation: A Complete Local LLM Guide by Pramod Dutta
Pramod shares a practical Playwright plus Ollama setup with privacy and compliance in mind.
What Building an AI Testing System Taught Me About Where the Field Actually Is by Neil Duggan
Building an AI testing tool from scratch gave Neil Duggan a rare vantage point on what actually works. Take a look and find out so you can start building one too.
Playwright Fixture with Page Object Model (POM) by Sandali Dilshani
This is a practical walkthrough of Playwright fixtures and Page Object Models. Sandali Dilshani shows how custom fixtures remove repetitive setup while giving tests clean, reusable access to page objects.
🔍 Test Automation
💨 Performance
PulsePost: A Tiny Load Tester That Helped Me Avoid Overbuilding by Alexander
This is a refreshingly look at load testing an MVP API with a simple custom tool, focused on answering whether the current system has enough headroom rather than chasing benchmark numbers.
🔍 Performance Testing
🛠️ Resources & Tools
PerfAI — AI-Powered JMeter Script Generator & Performance Analyser
Strands Evals SDK — A comprehensive evaluation framework for AI agents and LLM applications.
DeepEval — is a simple-to-use, open-source LLM evaluation framework, for evaluating large-language model systems.
pulsepost.py — A tiny keep-alive JSON POST load tester for checking API headroom before overbuilding
📝 List of Software Testers
Do you create content around Software Testing ? Submit yours blog details here and I will add it to the list.
🎁 Bonus Content
📌 OTHER INTERESTING STUFF
⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ
Measuring for AI success and quality improvement by Lisa Crispin
Checking Isn’t Testing. Soon It Won’t Be Employment Either by Keith Klain
How JavaScript Executes Code — Concepts Every QA Engineer Should Understand by Smita Dash
😂 And Finally,
📨 Send Me Your Articles, Tutorials, Tools!
Wrote something? Send links via Direct Message on Twitter @thetestingkit (details here). If you have any suggestions for improvement or corrections, feel free to reply to this email.
Thanks to everyone for subscribing and reading!
Happy Testing!
Pritesh(@priteshusdadiya)