Issue #226 : Software Testing Notes
The AQuA Framework: Architecting Quality for AI Applications
Hello there! 👋
Welcome to the 226th 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:
Mobile App Testing: Real-Device Checklist for QA
Feedback on learning how to test
Negative Testing: Learning to test saying “no”
Lighthouse Performance Audits in Playwright
Accessibility, Automated Testing and AI - A Reality Check
and more…
✨ Featured
Your Complete Test Automation Cycle, Right Inside Your IDE
Meet BrowserStack Test Companion, agentic AI that brings the full test automation cycle into your IDE.
From test case generation and script authoring to execution, debugging, and maintenance. It adapts to Playwright, Selenium, Cypress, Appium, WebdriverIO, and TestNG, and installs in VS Code, Cursor, Visual Studio, and JetBrains IDEs.
📚 Testing
Mobile App Testing: Real-Device Checklist for QA by Julia Pottinger
Mobile apps fail in ways simulators cannot reproduce, so you need a testing strategy built around real devices. Julia Pottinger shows how to balance simulators, emulators, and real devices while AI speeds up failure analysis, leaving you to validate the real user experience.
5 big ideas from "Taking Testing Seriously" book by Oleksandr Romanov
Testing needs human judgment, and test automation is only supporting that work. Oleksandr Romanov highlights the biggest lessons from Taking Testing Seriously, covering quality, AI and bug reporting.
Test Volume Bloat Isn’t a Volume Problem by Puja Jagani
AI makes it easy to generate more tests, but obsolete tests can quickly become expensive. Puja Jagani explains why deleting tests is just as important as maintaining them and how to identify tests that no longer add value.
A balanced view: Quality is everyone’s responsibility and Gates to prevent bad things. by Melissa Fisher
Quality is everyone's responsibility, but shared ownership doesn't eliminate the need for independent testing. Melissa Fisher explains why teams need both quality practices throughout development and release gates that challenge risky changes.
Capture the Bugs - Feedback on learning how to test by Maaret Pyhäjärvi
Maaret Pyhäjärvi introduces us to the Capture the Bugs, an app that helps you practice exploratory testing. It lets you hunt for defects, measures your exploration, and compares your findings against known issues using AI.
Defect Management: Lifecycle, Types, Metrics, and Best Practices by Jenny Keeper
Learn how defects move from discovery to resolution with a structured defect management process. Jenny Keeper covers defect lifecycles, severity, priority, key metrics, and reporting best practices.
The Integration Seam by Jeff Nyman
Software defects frequently occur at the unmanaged boundaries between independent tools. Jeff Nyman explores how integrations between Git, GitHub, CI, and automation tools create unexpected failures and why testing these seams uncovers problems documentation often misses.
Negative Testing: Learning to test saying “no” by Alison
Personal growth sometimes means saying no, even to opportunities that validate success. Alison shows how testing habits helped evaluate priorities and avoid overcommitting.
Test Data Three Ways by James Thomas
Different testing goals need different kinds of test data. James Thomas explains practical strategies for regression, performance, and exploratory testing, including how LLMs can help generate and analyze data.
🔍 Software Testing
⚙️ Automation
The AQuA Framework: Architecting Quality for AI Applications by Shay Shamay
Shay Shamay introduces the AQuA framework and explains how prevention, detection, governance, observability, and continuous learning improve AI quality. You’ll learn how golden datasets and LLM-based evaluation can help you to expose failures throughout the application lifecycle.
Graduating from toBeTruthy: Choosing Meaningful Matchers in Playwright’s expect by Katsuya Ds
Generic assertions often make Playwright tests flaky. Katsuya Ds shares when to use web-first assertions, native matchers, and custom expectations to build more reliable tests.
🔍 Test Automation
💨 Performance
Lighthouse Performance Audits in Playwright by Pramod Dutta
Pramod Dutta showcases how to run Lighthouse audits on authenticated pages, measure Core Web Vitals, and fail CI when performance issues occur.
🔍 Performance Testing
🌞 Accessibility
CAST 2026: "Accessibility, Automated Testing and AI - A Reality Check" with Chad Hester by Michael Larsen
Human evaluation remains essential for accessible software. Automation can find accessibility issues, but it can't tell you whether an application is truly usable. Michael Larsen explains how AI and axe-core support WCAG compliance while highlighting the limits of automated testing.
🔍 Accessibility Testing
🛠️ Resources & Tools
SQL Murder Mystery — Learn SQL in a fun and gamified way.
plow — A high-performance HTTP benchmarking tool with real-time web UI and terminal displaying
Cypress GraphQL Mock Network — Simple network mocking for your GraphQL API.
📝 List of Software Testers
Do you create content around Software Testing ? Submit yours blog here and I will add it to the list.
🎁 Bonus Content
📌 OTHER INTERESTING STUFF
⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ
Stop Writing Tests. Start Orchestrating Them. by Raymond Sambur
Stop Asking AI for Test Cases: Building a Gate-Controlled SDET Prompt by Ujjwal Kumar Singh
Understand exploratory testing, and unlock its true value by Stuart Thomas
😂 And Finally,
📨 Send Me Your Articles, Tutorials, Tools!
Wrote something? Send me links via DM on X @thetestingkit or via Submit link. 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)