Welcome to the 221st 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:

• What makes human testers completely indispensable.

• Quality Isn’t an Activity… It’s a System!

• Why using accessibility tree is better than DOM.

• Force AI assistants to respect your testing standards.

• Uncover hidden production bottlenecks with chaotic randomized testing.

and more…

✨ Featured

Stop fixing broken Playwright tests every sprint

UI changes shouldn't break your test suite. Test-Lab's AI automatically heals Playwright tests when selectors change, generates coverage from plain English, and keeps maintenance near zero. Teams report flaky-test rates under 2%. Run your first test free, no card required.

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📚 Testing

Stop The Tester’s Inferiority Complex: QA and Dev Are Equals by Vincent Ferreira

If you ever feel undervalued as a quality assurance tester, this excellent article by Vincent Ferreira is an absolute must read.

A tester’s guide to preventing implementation details from becoming the product by Ishalli Garg

Have you ever watched technical limitations quietly hijack product decisions and ruin a perfectly good user experience? Ishalli Garg talks about how implementation driven design sneaks into our workflows and why testers are always the first to spot the danger.

AI Will Replace Testers. Just Like Automation Did. And Codeless Tools Did. Any Day Now. by Alona Titova

Worried about AI stealing your QA job? You need to read this article. Alona Titova brilliantly argues how the incoming flood of AI-generated code actually makes human testers more indispensable.

Furthermore, Alan Richardson’s actual daily workflow How I Use AI for Software Development will be a great help.

Quality Isn’t an Activity… It’s a System! by Dan Ashby

Dan Ashby explores why quality is becoming a distributed engineering capability, with AI connecting people, tools, and signals instead of replacing testers

🔍 Software Testing

⚙️ Automation

Playwright tip: validate the accessibility tree, not the DOM by Viktor Konovalov

Viktor Konovalov share a very good tip on targeting the accessibility tree rather than the DOM to create wildly robust and user focused test suites.

How I Built an Agent That Writes (and Fixes) Its Own Playwright Tests by Santhosh D S

Santhosh D S shares details on how to build an autonomous agent that generates and automatically repairs reliable Playwright specs by firmly grounding LLMs in the accessibility tree.

The Framework Was Never the Hard Part. AI Changed That. by Dmytro Shyshkin

We waste so much breath debating testing frameworks. Dmytro Shyshkin shares how AI generated tests frequently falsely pass, proving your human QA instincts remain absolutely vital.

How to Write a CLAUDE.md (and AGENTS.md) for Test Automation by Julia Pottinger

Tired of AI coding assistants ignoring your specific testing standards? Julia Pottinger shares a guide to building agent instruction files with a simple workflow to force models to respect your codebase instead of generating useless boilerplate.

🔍 Test Automation

💨 Performance

Prompt Engineering for Performance Engineers: Chain-of-Thought, Prompt Chaining, and Iterative Refinement by NaveenKumar Namachivayam

We all know the frustration of feeding an AI a vague query and getting a generic response. NaveenKumar Namachivayam breaks down how performance engineers can treat prompt design exactly like writing code to extract truly actionable insights from LLMs.

Beyond TPS: When Thinking Like a User Solved What Metrics Couldn’t by Priya Raman

If your load tests constantly pass while your production servers mysteriously crash, Priya Raman shares why abandoning rigid analytics models for beautifully chaotic randomized testing is the secret to uncovering hidden bottlenecks.

Load Testing vs Stress Testing: How to Align Them With Business Goals by Jenny Keeper

Still confusing Load testing with stress testing? Jenny Keeper cuts through the usual QA jargon and shares a highly actionable framework for knowing exactly when to push your servers to the limit.

Scaling Playwright‑BDD to 3,000+ Tests Without Losing Your Mind by Laxminarayana Boga

If your BDD test suite has mutated into a sluggish nightmare, Laxminarayana Boga demonstrates how ditching traditional Cucumber state in favor of Playwright fixtures keeps thousands of automated tests beautifully fast and maintainable.

🔍 Performance Testing

🛠️ Resources & Tools

Test-Lab — Autonomous AI agents that automatically detect bugs, broken workflows, and UI issues without requiring test scripts.

super-api-playwright-tester — high-performance E2E testing wrapper that combines the lightning-fast API contract assertions of super-api-tester with the robust browser automation layers of Playwright.

Astur — Fast, native mobile automation without the Appium server. Inspect layout trees in real-time, record gestures instantly, and author tests with clean Playwright ergonomics.

📝 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

• How We Hire Engineers When AI Writes Our Code

• Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity

• How a Promotion Can Kill a Career

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. Playwright AI Testing on a Budget: Locators vs. Computer Vision — StarEast 2026 by David Mello

2. Playwright Best Practices: 10 Rules AI Agents Get Wrong (2026) by Anton Gulin

3. Not Every Test Should Be an AI Agent by Oleksii Samara

😂 And Finally,

Developer and Tester walk into Localhost 🤣

📨 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)

Welcome to the 220th 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:

• Playwright AI Testing on a Budget

• From Load to Confidence: A Performance Strategy for Scalable Pipelines

• Beyond Page Objects: Scaling Playwright Frameworks for Modern SPAs

• What Is Headless Browser Testing?

and more…

📚 Testing

Not Every Test Should Be an AI Agent by Oleksii Samara

Oleksii Samara shares a thoughtful reality check on the gap between AI’s impact on software development and its much messier role in QA.

I thought AI made me a better tester. It made me an honest one. by Aryadevi Neelakantabhattathiri

Aryadevi Neelakantabhattathiri takes a refreshingly honest look at how AI changes testing, not by removing responsibility but by making it easier to mistake confidence for correctness.

🔍 Software Testing

⚙️ Automation

Playwright AI Testing on a Budget: Locators vs. Computer Vision — StarEast 2026 by David Mello

This is a detailed look by David Mello at where Playwright and AI genuinely improve test automation, separating the real productivity gains from the hype around autonomous testing.

What Is Headless Browser Testing? by Sean Wintermere

Sean Wintermere shares a practical guide to headless browser testing that goes beyond the usual speed narrative and focuses on the tradeoffs teams encounter at scale. I appreciated that it treats headless execution as a powerful optimization rather than a complete testing strategy.

Playwright Best Practices: 10 Rules AI Agents Get Wrong (2026) by Anton Gulin

Anton Gulin has put together a checklist for reviewing AI-generated Playwright tests, focusing on the habits that separate reliable automation from fragile green builds.

Do you still call selenium methods directly from tests: Building a Composable UI Interaction Engine for Mobile Tests by Harshad Bodekar

Harshad Bodekar shares a case study of dismantling a monolithic mobile automation framework and replacing it with a layered architecture built around clear boundaries, typed contracts, and composition.

Beyond Page Objects: Scaling Playwright Frameworks for Modern SPAs by chaitanya sanapala

chaitanya sanapala writes about how Playwright test architecture needs to evolve as applications grow, moving from page-centric design toward reusable components and business-focused workflows.

🔍 Test Automation

💨 Performance

From Load to Confidence: A Performance Strategy for Scalable Pipelines by Priya Raman

Priya Raman shares a practical walkthrough of validating a high-volume event pipeline, focusing on how batch patterns, sustained load, and multi-system concurrency reveal different kinds of performance risks.

🔍 Performance Testing

🛠️ Resources & Tools

Chaos-Test Your AI Agent — Fault Injection for Claude Code, Codex, Copilot & OpenCode

Canary — QA harness built for Claude Code | E2E testing with screen recordings, console logs, network HARs, and Playwright traces

astra-ai-automation-agent — Playwright Python test framework with an AI agent that generates tests from Jira/Excel tickets using RAG + GPT-4o

📝 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

• The 20 Software Engineering Laws

• I’m an introvert. This is how I get myself to speak up.

• The Economics of Software Teams: Why Most Organizations Are Flying Blind

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. AI readiness radar by Callum Akehurst-Ryan

2. How I Made Our Test Suite 43% Faster by Deleting One Configuration by Yevhen Bozhenko

3. Test the Feature, Not the Endpoint by Gil Zilberfeld

😂 And Finally,

Engineering teams in the age of AI🤣

📨 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)

Welcome to the 219th 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:

• What the Animal Kingdom Can Teach Us About Quality Engineering

• Test the Feature, Not the Endpoint

• Playwright Screencasts and Agentic Receipts

• Can AI Replace Days of Performance Analysis? I Tested It on 16 Microservices

• WebDriver BiDi for Test Automation: Making Accessibility Part of How You Test

and more…

📚 Testing

AI readiness radar by Callum Akehurst-Ryan

Have you ever wondered that AI might be amplifying existing bad engineering habits rather than fixing them? Callum Akehurst-Ryan shifts the conversation from tooling hype to actual organizational readiness to build better foundation.

KYC for Testers: Know Your Customer Before You Test a Thing by Rahul Parwal

Testing advice often starts with tools and techniques, but Rahul Parwal makes a interesting case about understanding your customers first. I like how it reframes quality as protecting user value, turning a familiar testing checklist into something much more strategic.

Test the Feature, Not the Endpoint by Gil Zilberfeld

Gil Zilberfeld challenges the idea that API tests alone can’t provide meaningful confidence, arguing that real assurance comes from testing the workflows those APIs enable.

What the Animal Kingdom Can Teach Us About Quality Engineering by Pricilla Bilavendran

Pricilla Bilavendran takes a playful look at software testing through animal archetypes, using traits from nature to reflect the different strengths that make teams effective as testers.

Looking Good, Testers! by James Thomas

In this thoughtful piece, James Thomas explores testing as the act of truly looking, and where AI fits on the spectrum between direct understanding and abstraction.

🔍 Software Testing

⚙️ Automation

System/UI Tests – The Layer You Should Hate Needing by Kevin Roe

While so many teams quietly accumulate slow, flaky suites and mistake them for coverage. Kevin Roe makes a strong case for treating system tests as a scarce, high cost resource, reserved only for failures that can emerge after deployment.

How I Made Our Test Suite 43% Faster by Deleting One Configuration by Yevhen Bozhenko

Yevhen Bozhenko turns a familiar Selenium best practice into a concrete performance investigation, showing how overlapping wait strategies can quietly drain speed from an entire test suite.

Tests That Don't Lie, Part 1: Readability and DSL by Kamil J.

This article is about writing tests that optimize for confidence and maintainability rather than chasing coverage metrics, using patterns that make tests read closer to business requirements. Kamil J. advocates for treating tests as long lived documentation, not just code that happens to verify behavior.

Playwright Screencasts and Agentic Receipts by Martin Poole

Martin Poole explores Playwright’s new screencast capabilities. Turning automation runs into reviewable receipts is a good idea, especially as AI agents make understanding the path taken just as important as the outcome.

How I Standardized a Large Cypress Test Codebase with ESLint and Prettier by John

This article walks through using ESLint, Prettier, hooks, and CI checks to turn code style into an automated rule.

If Playwright Has Auto-Waiting, Why Do We Still Need Explicit Waits? by Arpita Biswas

Playwright’s auto waiting has it’s place but it’s not a one cure for all illness. Arpita Biswas explains where Playwright’s auto waiting ends and where explicit waits still earn their place, drawing a useful line between element readiness and application readiness.

🔍 Test Automation

💨 Performance

Can AI Replace Days of Performance Analysis? I Tested It on 16 Microservices by shabab koohi

shabab koohi explores an AI skill that automates performance engineering across a complex microservices stack, from load testing and profiling to root cause analysis.

🔍 Performance Testing

🌞 Accessibility

WebDriver BiDi for Test Automation: Making Accessibility Part of How You Test by Puja Jagani

Puja Jagani explores how WebDriver BiDi brings accessibility checks directly into everyday test automation by exposing the browser’s accessibility tree as a first class testing target.

🔍 Accessibility Testing

🛠️ Resources & Tools

VOLDER — schema builder and data validation and parsing

Dummy — Run mock server based off an API contract with one command

Playwright Logger — A clean and readable Playwright reporter that turns noisy test output into structured, timestamped, developer-friendly logs — all right in the terminal

📝 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

• High Performance Git

• Dropping sprints: a year with Shape Up

• The Git Commands I Run Before Reading Any Code

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. The quirky little bug that taught me a valuable testing lesson by Ady Stokes

2. With Claude: Less Coding, More Testing by Henrik Warne

3. I Stopped Rebuilding My QA Context Every Session. Here Is the System I Built Instead. by Jaren Charles Cudilla

😂 And Finally,

Claude Fable 5's Latest Benchmarks For Non US Citizens 🤣

📨 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)

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.

Register Now. for Free!

📚 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

• I Stopped Needing to Spend Three Hours a Day Finding Things Out

• What I Learned From Nearly 1,000 Interviews at Amazon

• Components of A Coding Agent

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. Measuring for AI success and quality improvement by Lisa Crispin

2. Checking Isn’t Testing. Soon It Won’t Be Employment Either by Keith Klain

3. How JavaScript Executes Code — Concepts Every QA Engineer Should Understand by Smita Dash

😂 And Finally,

The binary problem 🤣

📨 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)

Welcome to the 217th 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:

• Measuring for AI success and quality improvement

• How JavaScript Executes Code — Concepts Every QA Engineer Should Understand

• The DevSecOps Guide to Automated Web Security Testing

• XPath Demystified: Smart Locators for Modern Testing

• How we test color palettes before they ship in scientific figures

and more…

📚 Testing

Measuring for AI success and quality improvement by Lisa Crispin

Quality metrics are usually treated like a shortcut to better software, but Lisa Crispin argues they only matter when tied to small, deliberate experiments.

Checking Isn’t Testing. Soon It Won’t Be Employment Either by Keith Klain

This is less a defense of testers than a warning that too many confused repetitive checking with actual investigative work, and Keith Klain shares how AI is about to expose the difference brutally.

Testing: The Art of Unlearning by Jeff Nyman

Another great piece by Jeff Nyman comparing between scientific revolutions and software testing, I enjoyed how it connects Galileo, Einstein, and modern AI testing.

Tests Don’t Just Break, They Communicate by Johnny Nilsson

Johnny Nilsson argues that testing discussions have become obsessed with labels while ignoring the more important question of what kind of confidence a test actually provides.

🔍 Software Testing

⚙️ Automation

How JavaScript Executes Code — Concepts Every QA Engineer Should Understand by Smita Dash

Smita Dash shares a practical walkthrough of the JavaScript concepts QA engineers usually learn too late, after spending hours debugging flaky UI behavior.

What Would You Stop Doing When UI Tests Are Flaky? by David Mello

David Mello starts this article as an interview question breakdown but turns into a much sharper discussion about how experienced QA engineers think under ambiguity and diagnose flaky system.

DOM State Clarity With cy.depends Command by Gleb Bahmutov

Gleb Bahmutov explores a smarter way to write Cypress tests by treating the UI as a set of possible states instead of waiting blindly for one happy path to appear.

XPath Demystified: Smart Locators for Modern Testing by Dhiraj

This is a solid refresher on XPath fundamentals along tradeoff discussion between XPath and CSS selectors in test automation

Practicing Playwright: Visual Testing With Playwright by Thomas F. - T.J. - Maher, Jr.

Thomas F. shares a practical introduction to Playwright’s built in visual testing, but the more interesting discussion is about the operational cost that arrives once snapshot testing scales beyond a handful of checks.

Speaking of Playwright, If want to get started with it, Željko Šević wrote a quick guide to get you started → Browser automation with Playwright

Prompt Test Personas and Templates by Andrejs Doronins

Andrejs Doronins makes a compelling case that AI testing workflows work better with narrowly scoped personas instead of one giant “universal tester” prompt trying to do everything at once.

🔍 Test Automation

🌞 Accessibility

How we test color palettes before they ship in scientific figures

How to test for color palettes? read this article and find out.

Session Timeouts: The Overlooked Accessibility Barrier In Authentication Design by Eleanor Hecks

Session timeouts are usually treated like a security setting. Eleanor Hecks makes the case that they’re also an accessibility issue..

🔍 Accessibility Testing

🔒 Security

OWASP ZAP Deep Dive: The DevSecOps Guide to Automated Web Security Testing by Sushant Sur

Most teams already run unit tests and CI pipelines. Sushant Sur explains why that still isn’t enough and shares a walkthrough of spiders, passive vs. active scans, Docker workflows, and CI integration makes DevSecOps feel much more operational and less like a buzzword.

🔍 Security Testing

🛠️ Resources & Tools

Agentic QA — Multi-agent AI system that autonomously plans, writes, executes, and reports tests for REST APIs, web UIs, and Python codebases.

Agentic Test Explorer — An agnostic AI-driven exploratory test framework created by Oscar Barrios Torrero that intelligently explores, tests, and validates any application

Practical Testing Docs — This site helps you test better - whether you’re a tester or a developer looking for quick, effective testing ideas.

QA Claude Skill — 24 production-grade QA workflow skills for Claude Code — from spec to release.

📝 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

• How can I as a leader build hope in my team?

• The unwritten laws of software engineering

• Employers are using your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you’ll accept

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. How I Test the Same Feature Three Ways: UI, API, and DB by Daniel Cawen

2. What Makes Good Context For AI-Generated Tests? by Puja Jagani

3. Quality Insight: The "Reach Out" Rule, But For Testing by Judy Mosley

😂 And Finally,

This is what happens when you let AI test everything🤣

📨 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)

Welcome to the 216th 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:

• The QA Lessons You Only Learn When the Stakes Are High

• Ten Years in Test, Three Different Worlds: What I Learned Moving from Web to Embedded to AI

• What Makes Good Context For AI-Generated Tests?

• Appium Predicate Locator for iOS

• Your Load Test Passed. Your Server Crashed. Here’s Why (Little’s Law Fix Inside)

and more…

✨ Featured

QA Takes the Lead is Back on May 27th

Now more than ever, it's time to transform the way we talk about QA, and align with what business and leadership really cares about.

Join PractiTest’s 2nd edition of this, free online conference, to learn from industry thought leaders about the new role of QA.

Save you spot. It's free to attend!

📚 Testing

Quality Insight: The "Reach Out" Rule, But For Testing by Judy Mosley

Judy Mosley wrote a a thoughtful piece about the importance speaking up as a QA, whether that’s asking a question, challenging an assumption, or simply reaching out to someone who’s on your mind.

The QA Lessons You Only Learn When the Stakes Are High by Dimple Bajaj

This is a sharp look from Dimple Bajaj at what a decade in safety critical QA teaches you about engineering culture, risk, and why “shift left” only works when teams actually believe quality matters.

Ten Years in Test, Three Different Worlds: What I Learned Moving from Web to Embedded to AI by Rajasekhar S.

Rajasekhar S. takes a look back at 10 years in testing and takes a tour through three very different eras of test engineering, from Selenium to embedded devices to evaluating non deterministic AI systems.

🔍 Software Testing

⚙️ Automation

Where Goal-Based Agentic Testing Sits in the Mobile Automation Pyramid by Russell Morley

Russell Morley makes a really useful case of placing place goal based agentic testing into the familiar automation pyramid without pretending it replaces everything underneath it.

How I Test the Same Feature Three Ways: UI, API, and DB by Daniel Cawen

Daniel Cawen shares a practical walkthrough of building a layered Playwright and Cucumber test suite that treats UI, API, and database validation as complementary signals instead of isolated checks.

What Makes Good Context For AI-Generated Tests? by Puja Jagani

Puja Jagani makes a case for why AI generated tests are only as good as the context behind them, and why production history, failure modes, and system constraints matter more than clever prompts alone.

How I Reduced Debugging Time in Test Automation Using AI

This is a practical exploration of AI assisted debugging that focuses less on the model itself and more on the quality of context surrounding a failure.

Appium Predicate Locator for iOS by Courtney Zhan

Courtney Zhan share a crisp introduction to Appium predicate locators on iOS, covering the syntax, tradeoffs, and where they fit alongside more familiar XPath strategies.

🔍 Test Automation

💨 Performance

Hunting iOS Memory Leaks by Amanjeet Singh

This is a fascinating look at building an automated memory leak hunting workflow around XCTestLeaks, complete with AI assisted debugging, GitHub Actions orchestration. Thanks for sharing this gem Amanjeet Singh.

Your Load Test Passed. Your Server Crashed. Here’s Why (Little’s Law Fix Inside) by Jenish Patel

Little’s Law gets quoted constantly in performance testing, but Jenish Patel explains why the math often falls apart in real load tests. This article is a detailed walkthrough of workload models, think time distributions, coordinated omission, and IPS vs RPS confusion that makes a strong case that accurate modelling matters far more than the load tool itself.

Load Testing using K6 with Playwright and Showing result in locally generated html report by Pankaj Kumar Shee

Pankaj Kumar Shee shares a thorough walkthrough of building a reusable k6 performance-testing framework with JavaScript, Playwright, PowerShell, and Azure DevOps, covering everything from workload profiles and HTML reporting to auth-token bootstrapping and CI execution.

🔍 Performance Testing

🔒 Security

Using LLMs to Find Security Bugs: A Practitioner’s Playbook by Ido Green

Ido Green takes a look at using LLMs for AppSec without falling into the “AI scanner” trap, focusing instead on structured workflows, multi-model consensus, and ruthless validation.

🔍 Security Testing

🛠️ Resources & Tools

Mentoss — The best way to mock JavaScript fetch requests

ShareX — Capture or record any area of your screen and share it with a single press of a key.

Mocking Star — open-source request mocking tool that streamlines network debugging and enhances UI test reliability.

📝 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

• Agent Harness Engineering

• How to hire people who are better than you

• IAM: Everything You Need to Know

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. Claude Code For QA — The Agentic Workflow That Will Save You 100+ Hours by Art Krylov

2. How I Used AI to Fix Our E2E Test Architecture by Debbie O’Brien

3. RAG for QA Engineers: A Practical Introduction with a Working Example by Swati Seela

😂 And Finally,

code And Test And Pull Request 🤣

📨 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)

Welcome to the 215th 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:

• The Chessboard Lesson: Why Good Testing Is About Playing the Right Moves

• I wrote a .NET assertion library to understand assertion libraries

• Claude Code For QA — The Agentic Workflow That Will Save You 100+ Hours

• Common Mistakes in Performance Testing (And How to Fix Them)

• The Human in the Loop Isn’t Going Anywhere: They’re Just Moving Up

and more…

✨ Featured

One week to Breakpoint: How QA teams are actually putting AI to work

With one week to go before Breakpoint 2026, most QA teams have moved past the question of whether to use AI and are sitting with the harder one of how to use it well.

Avinash Ahuja from NVIDIA, Keith Klain, and Ashley Hunsberger are on stage talking about scaling AI, where agentic workflows actually deliver, and what it takes to move past the pilot. The conference runs free and virtual from May 12 to 14.

Save my spot, Free!

📚 Testing

The Chessboard Lesson: Why Good Testing Is About Playing the Right Moves by Emna Ayadi

Emna Ayadi has written an thoughtful piece drawing parallel between chess and software testing. A gentle reminder that real coverage comes from thinking ahead, not doing more.

🔍 Software Testing

⚙️ Automation

How I Used AI to Fix Our E2E Test Architecture by Debbie O’Brien

A detailed case study by Debbie O’Brien on fixing a broken Playwright suite by combining AI-driven analysis with a careful refactor to make tests reliable and runnable locally.

Testing Firefox Extensions with Playwright: End-to-End Testing Guide

A hands-on guide to testing Firefox extensions with Playwright with a simple E2E setups to cover UI state and offline behavior too.

I wrote a .NET assertion library to understand assertion libraries by spearzy

spearzy build a .NET assertion library from scratch, using it as a way to explore deterministic failure output, batching, and what testing AI-heavy systems might actually need.

Organising Cypress at scale - Part 1: Custom Commands by Kevin Korenhof

Kevin Korenhof takes a practical look at scaling Cypress by reorganising custom commands, from single bloated file to a modular, grouped structure that’s easier to navigate and maintain.

Claude Code For QA — The Agentic Workflow That Will Save You 100+ Hours by Art Krylov

Art Krylov takes a deep dive into an agent-driven QA workflow that replaces ad hoc AI usage with a structured pipeline, using sub-agents, MCP integrations, and review gates to handle everything from test cases to automation.

RAG for QA Engineers: A Practical Introduction with a Working Example by Swati Seela

Do you know how to use RAG as a QA engineer? If not, then this article is for you. Swati Seela details why AI-generated test cases feel generic and how adding system context with RAG turns them into something far more specific and useful.

The Human in the Loop Isn’t Going Anywhere: They’re Just Moving Up by Simon Prior

Simon Prior takes a thoughtful view on AI in testing, and draws a clear line between generating tests and deciding what’s worth testing.

Intercept Everything: API Logging Middleware for Playwright by Viatsheslav Pashanin

Tests are hard to debug when they are running as a part of CI. Viatsheslav Pashanin shares how to use logging with API client layer to get structured, reliable traces of the test failures.

Speaking of CI, Rajesh Lingam writes Your CI Is Slow Because You’re Testing Too Much by Rajesh Lingam

🔍 Test Automation

💨 Performance

Common Mistakes in Performance Testing (And How to Fix Them) by Oleh Koren

Oleh Koren shares few common performance testing mistakes we tend to make and how to fix them.

🔍 Performance Testing

🛠️ Resources & Tools

Alumnium — is an AI-native library and MCP for end-to-end testing. It builds upon the existing test automation ecosystem and simplifies interactions with applications, providing more robust mechanisms for verifying assertions. It works with Appium, Playwright, or Selenium

📝 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

• Nobody Is Coming to Save Your Career

• What I Learned From Nearly 1,000 Interviews at Amazon

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. Stop Letting AI Write Your Test Cases (You’re Slowing Yourself Down) by Janna Loeffler

2. 94% Use AI for Testing. Only 12% Have Escaped the Chaos. Here’s What They Know That You Don’t by Abhishek Johri

3. BDD Gherkin Guidelines for AI Coding and Testing by Andrew Knight

😂 And Finally,

It's not a performance Issue, we are AI Native🤣

📨 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)

Welcome to the 214th 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:

• Stop Letting AI Write Your Test Cases (You’re Slowing Yourself Down)

• What happens when you pair Playwright with something other than TypeScript?

• Cypress cy.prompt Vs Recording Vs Coding

• BDD Gherkin Guidelines for AI Coding and Testing

• Load and stress testing with Artillery

and more…

✨ Featured

The Technical Manual for Testing in 2026

Most teams are stuck between AI hype and the reality of a broken pipeline. Breakpoint 2026 is where you get the specific blueprints to bridge that gap.

QA leaders from NVIDIA and Microsoft share the frameworks and workshops they use to keep their testing stable. It’s a direct technical download for your next sprint. Join from wherever you are, May 12–14.

Save your spot!

📚 Testing

Stop Letting AI Write Your Test Cases (You’re Slowing Yourself Down) by Janna Loeffler

Janna Loeffler challenges the rush to AI-generated test cases, arguing they often add noise and shift effort from thinking to filtering rather than improving quality.

AI Writes Go Tests That Pass — That’s Not the Same as Tests That Catch Bugs by Benoit Gouthière

AI-written tests often inflate coverage while quietly missing real bugs, optimizing for passing checks instead of meaningful verification. read Benoit Gouthière’s take on why coverage has become a misleading metric.

94% Use AI for Testing. Only 12% Have Escaped the Chaos. Here’s What They Know That You Don’t by Abhishek Johri

Abhishek writes about how widespread blind AI testing adoption is keeping most teams stuck in fragile automation that can’t keep up.

🔍 Software Testing

⚙️ Automation

Cognitive Automation: This Isn’t About How Fast You Can Generate Scripts by Simon Prior

While most AI testing is just faster automation, Simon Prior introduces us to “cognitive automation” as using AI to sharpen judgment rather than replace it.

What happens when you pair Playwright with something other than TypeScript? by Thomas F. - T.J. - Maher, Jr.

T.J. - Maher talks about how much “framework choice” really affects day-to-day testing quality with example of Playwright and TypeScript. It’s a practical reminder that tooling ecosystems matter.

Creating a Playwright framework with AI by Callum Akehurst-Ryan

Callum Akehurst-Ryan shares a walks through of building a Playwright E2E framework with AI, showing how it works best as a guided junior rather than an autonomous tester.

The Flaky Test Files: The Case of the State Pollution by Gil Zilberfeld

State pollution in test automation refers to a common, critical issue where one test case modifies shared resources such as memory, databases, or the file system and fails to clean them up, causing subsequent, independent tests to fail unpredictably.

Gil Zilberfeld explores how flaky tests often stem from hidden assumptions, like state pollution.

Cypress cy.prompt Vs Recording Vs Coding by Gleb Bahmutov

Gleb Bahmutov compares Cypress test creation via prompts, recording, and manual coding, concluding the “fast” options generate messy, unreliable automation code that needs heavy cleanup.

BDD Gherkin Guidelines for AI Coding and Testing by Andrew Knight

Andrew Knight shares Gherkin guidelines file to steer AI toward clearer, more disciplined BDD scenarios instead of vague, UI-heavy noise.

Speaking of BDD, Anubhav C. shows how to use Playwright BDD Without Cucumber: TypeScript Decorators and DataTables

9+ Software Testing Agents to Know by Daniel Knott

This is a video post from Daniel Knott talking about 9 AI software testing agents that can help speed up your work as software teste.

🔍 Test Automation

💨 Performance

Load and stress testing with Artillery by Željko Šević

Željko Šević shares a practical walkthrough with example on how to get stated with using Artillery for performance testing.

🔍 Performance Testing

🛠️ Resources & Tools

Gherkin Guidelines for AI — provides guidelines for writing good Gherkin scenarios. Read it to learn how to formulate robustly readable scenarios by hand. Feed it as context to AI specs, agents, and skills to generate scenarios for acceptance criteria and test cases.

LiveBench — a benchmark for LLMs designed with test set contamination and objective evaluation in mind

📝 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

• A Decade of Docker Containers

• In-Person vs Remote Engineering Teams

• How Do You Know If You’re a Good Leader?

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. AI-Powered API Testing at Scale by Nikhil Gupta

2. The playwright-explore-website Copilot skill by Roger Rajaratnam

3. Test smart: how to approach AI and stay sane? by Julia Kocbek

😂 And Finally,

How Software Development Lifecycle works in real world 🤣

📨 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)

Welcome to the 213th 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:

• Hands-On Fintech AI Prompt Injection Testing in LLMs

• AI-Powered API Testing at Scale

• Test smart: how to approach AI and stay sane?

• Nobody Is QA Testing Their LLM Apps (That’s Going to Be a Problem)

• Simple JavaScript Automation Unit Testing Using Jest

and more…

✨ Featured

What are the best QA minds thinking about right now?

Breakpoint 2026 is where you find out. This year’s speakers are sitting with the questions most teams haven’t said out loud yet — about what AI really changes for the QA engineer, whether test automation has ever delivered what it promised, and where human judgment still belongs in all of this.

Keith Klain, Avinash Ahuja, Brittany Stewart, and Ashley Hunsberger each have an answer. And they don’t all agree. Join them from wherever you are, 12–15 May.

Save your spot!

📚 Testing

You’re not ready for Quality Engineering by Callum Akehurst-Ryan

A candid look at how testing often drifts away from what engineers actually need, hurting trust and teamwork. Callum Akehurst-Ryan rightly calls out habits that feel normal but might be holding the whole field back.

Drowned in Slack, Calls and Bugs: A QA Survival Guide by Olga Silanova

A relatable take by Olga Silanova on handling QA chaos in startups, from constant noise to unclear expectations and too many meetings.

🔍 Software Testing

⚙️ Automation

AI-Powered API Testing at Scale by Nikhil Gupta

Learn how to use AI to generate API tests from feature files, specs, or code. Nikhil Gupta ties all together with a scalable pipeline and strict data discipline.

Why Your CI Test Suite Keeps Getting Slower by Dennis Martinez

Dennis Martinez takes a thoughtful look at how CI test suites don’t suddenly break, they quietly decay, with small inefficiencies compounding until they stall your entire workflow.

Nobody Is QA Testing Their LLM Apps (That's Going to Be a Problem) by Andrew (Minh) Schwabe

Andrew (Minh) Schwabe puts a sharp argument that testing AI systems isn’t about correctness but managing uncertainty, where silent hallucinations replace obvious failures. I found the shift to statistical guarantees compelling, especially how it reframes QA from checking outputs to continuously measuring quality drift.

The playwright-explore-website Copilot skill by Roger Rajaratnam

Roger Rajaratnam shares a neat exploration of a Copilot skill that turns messy browser poking into structured Playwright test ideas, with the browser treated as the ultimate source of truth.

Simple JavaScript Automation Unit Testing Using Jest by Eyob Samuel

Eyob Samuel has written a hands-on walkthrough of using Jest to build and test a simple Node function.

From Manual UI Exploration to Runtime Validation: Rethinking Mobile Test Automation by Mehmet Serhat Özdursun

Mehmet shares a practical take on why mobile automation struggles with element discovery, arguing that AI guesses over messy UI trees aren’t enough and what to do about it.

Test smart: how to approach AI and stay sane? by Julia Kocbek

If treated carefully, AI is a great helper for QA. Julia Kocbek takes a thoughtful take on where AI fits in software work, especially in QA.

Appium Inspector: A Practical Guide to Features and Panels by Mayvin Ramasawmy

Mayvin Ramasawmy provides a clear walkthrough of Appium Inspector that moves past setup into how it actually helps you explore and interact with mobile apps during testing.

🔍 Test Automation

💨 Performance

We Built a JMX Generator for Our Own Test Architecture — Here’s the Honest Story by Oleksandr Kravchenko

An interesting look at how Oleksandr Kravchenko automated the JMX script creation for JMeter.

🔍 Performance Testing

🔒 Security

🔐 Hands-On Fintech AI Prompt Injection Testing in LLMs by Banu Tütüncü

Banu Tütüncü shows how simple inputs can subtly steer AI behavior rather than outright break it. If you are testing LLMs, this is a must read.

🔍 Security Testing

🛠️ Resources & Tools

maestro-ai-agent — Experimental but production-minded Python Maestro orchestration runtime for mobile apps using Maestro.

playwright-explore-website — Skills for Website exploration for testing using Playwright MCP

📝 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

• Interviewing tactics for a post-LLM world

• Seeing Everything, Understanding Nothing (The Context Trap)

• Management In The Age Of AI

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. Optimizing the wrong part of the testing process by Chris Kenst

2. My thoughts on 'self-healing' in test automation by Bas Dijkstra

3. Why software testers should write documentation even if no one else reads it by Shawn Vernier

😂 And Finally,

Future of Coding 🤣

📨 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)

Welcome to the 212th 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:

• Optimizing the wrong part of the testing process

• Thoughts on ‘self-healing’ in test automation

• Your AI-Generated Code Tests Might Be Lying to You

• Understanding TPS in Stress Testing

• Playwright Accessibility Testing: What axe and Lighthouse Miss

and more…

✨ Featured

The Selenium creator on AI testing, BiDi, and what’s real

If you’ve written a Selenium test, you’ve used something Jason Huggins built.

At Breakpoint 2026, he’s talking about where testing goes from here: BiDi, the shift-left rethink, and the gap between AI demos and what your sprint actually looks like. It’s free, virtual, and runs May 12–14.

Save Your Spot, It's Free!

📚 Testing

Optimizing the wrong part of the testing process by Chris Kenst

Chris Kenst shared a practical story of how inheriting a massive Cypress UI test suite reveals that automating every test case creates slow, low-signal feedback, and why shifting toward risk-based automation is essential. It’s a relatable rethink of what “good” test automation actually looks like.

When quantity leads to quality by Jitesh Gosai

This article reframes the quality versus quantity debate through Agile, arguing that faster feedback and iteration matter more than upfront perfection. Jitesh Gosai shares compelling reminder that in complex software environments, quality emerges from learning loops, not careful planning alone.

Why software testers should write documentation even if no one else reads it by Shawn Vernier

An opinionated take by Shawn Vernier on why testers should write documentation even when nobody reads it, arguing it’s really for memory, enforcement, and trust rather than communication.

🔍 Software Testing

⚙️ Automation

My thoughts on 'self-healing' in test automation by Bas Dijkstra

Bas Dijkstra has written a sharp critique of flaky GUI tests and so-called self-healing tools might mask real issues like poor communication and unnoticed changes. It’s a useful reminder that green tests mean little if they hide problems, and I’m inclined to agree.

From CI Failure to Root Cause in Seconds: MCP for QA Engineers by Irfan Mujagić

This is an intriguing glimpse at AI doing real investigative work. In this hands-on guide, Irfan Mujagić shares how to use MCP to connect AI directly to CI and shows how test triage can shift from slow manual digging to near-instant root cause analysis.

Your AI-Generated Code Tests Might Be Lying to You by Sriram Rajendran

A sharp argument for mutation testing over code coverage shows how AI-generated code can pass tests while still being wrong, exposing dangerous blind spots. It’s a convincing case that green tests can lie, and I’m starting to see coverage as a false sense of safety.

The Hard Part of AI Evals Isn’t the Tooling by Katja Obring

A thoughtful critique of AI eval tooling argues that while platforms automate measurement, they sidestep the harder question of what quality actually means, especially with biased LLM judges.

Furthermore, Akhona Eland has written about how to Test Your LLM Outputs in pytest (15ms, No API Key)

🔍 Test Automation

💨 Performance

Understanding TPS in Stress Testing (And Why It Matters More Than You Think)

A clear explanation of TPS shows why raw throughput alone can be misleading, and why latency and errors matter just as much when judging performance. It’s a helpful reset if you’ve ever chased big numbers.

🔍 Performance Testing

🌞 Accessibility

Playwright Accessibility Testing: What axe and Lighthouse Miss by David Mello

David Mello takes a sobering look at accessibility testing and argues that tools like Lighthouse and axe catch only a fraction of real issues, making “green checks” misleading.

Testing A11y Using Cypress And wick-a11y Plugin by Gleb Bahmutov

Gleb Bahmutov shares a quick walkthrough showing how adding wick-a11y to Cypress tests can surface accessibility issues in minutes with minimal setup.

🔍 Accessibility Testing

🛠️ Resources & Tools

api Spector — Local-first API testing tool. Inspect, test and mock APIs. Secrets stay on your machine.

pytest-semantix — Semantic LLM output testing for pytest. Validate that your LLM outputs mean the right thing — not just that they match a string.

📝 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

• Queueing Requests Queues Your Capacity Problems, Too

• Building me an executive assistant with Claude Code

• The two kinds of error

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. Playprom: Turn your Playwright test run into a time-series data by Lutfi Fitroh Hadi

2. Playwright POM (Without Classes): Make Your Tests Clean & Reusable (The Easy Way) by Aparna Mishra

3. 10 Years in QA: The Journey I Never Expected to Have by Vladimir Josifoski

😂 And Finally,

Test thy code 🤣

📨 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)

Welcome to the 211th 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:

• Vladimir Josifoski’s 10 Years Journey in QA

• Agent-Driven E2E Testing with Cypress

• Turn your Playwright test run into a time-series data

• Accessible web testing with Playwright and Axe Core

and more…

✨ Featured

Breakpoint 2026: Where QA Teams Figure Out AI Together

Most teams are navigating AI-driven testing without a playbook. Breakpoint 2026 is where QA leaders from NVIDIA, Mastercard, KPMG, Deloitte, and Microsoft share what’s actually working — live sessions, real Q&A, and hands-on workshops. Join from wherever you are, 12–14 May 2026.

Save your spot!

📚 Testing

10 Years in QA: The Journey I Never Expected to Have by Vladimir Josifoski

Vladimir Josifoski takes a look at a decade in QA, tracing the shift from ticking checkboxes to a more thoughtful, product-focused discipline shaped by automation and more recently AI.

Systems Thinking and Test Cases by Patrick Prill

Patrick Prill shares a interesting reflection on whether we trust our tests too much, and how exploratory and automated testing each shape what we believe to be true.

AI writes the code. But who tests it? by Axel Kirchner

AI is speeding up how we ship software, but it’s also amplifying a long-standing blind spot such as quality checks that we tend to skip when time gets tight. Axel Kirchner makes a strong case that automated end-to-end tests aren’t a luxury but the only real safety net keeping fast-moving teams from shipping broken, fragile systems.

on that note, Anh Nguyen Lewis has also written about AI Writes Your Tests. Here’s What It Systematically Misses.

🔍 Software Testing

⚙️ Automation

Agent-Driven E2E Testing with Cypress: A Practical Guide to Harness Engineering with Cursor Subagents by Darpan Shah

In this piece, Darpan Shah explores how agent-driven workflows can bring structure to end-to-end testing by wrapping AI in a “harness” of clearly defined roles.

Playprom: Turn your Playwright test run into a time-series data by Lutfi Fitroh Hadi

Learn how to turn your Playwright test runs into observability data instead of endlessly rebuilding custom reporters.

Stop Re-Explaining Your Test Conventions to Claude — Use SKILL.md by Gurudatt S A

Gurudatt S A shows how to make AI-generated Playwright tests consistently follow your conventions using a simple SKILL.md setup. It’s a practical way to stop fighting generic test output and turn AI into something that actually writes tests the way your codebase expects.

Playwright POM (Without Classes): Make Your Tests Clean & Reusable (The Easy Way) by Aparna Mishra

Aparna Mishra walks through a pragmatic take on the Page Object Model by stripping it down to simple reusable functions and showing how to tame growing Playwright test suites without diving into heavier patterns.

Furthermore, Martín Marchetto has also written about Evolving POM: From Page Objects to Agent-Friendly Design

🔍 Test Automation

💨 Performance

From 500 RPS to 100K RPS: How We Discovered the Real Bottleneck in Our Load Testing by Abhinav Tyagi

Abhinav Tyagi walks through a his team’s frustrating journey to hit 100k RPS, revealing how their real bottleneck wasn’t the system but the load testing setup itself. It’s a practical story of failed assumptions, better tooling, and the shift from “just generate load” to actually understanding system behavior under pressure.

🔍 Performance Testing

🌞 Accessibility

Accessible web testing with Playwright and Axe Core by Vitaly Skadorva

Vitaly Skadorva details how to use Playwright and axe-core to automate scans, ARIA snapshots, and real user flows.

🔍 Accessibility Testing

🛠️ Resources & Tools

playprom — A lightweight custom Playwright reporter that pushes test metrics to StatsD (and Prometheus via the StatsD Exporter). Built natively on top of the robust hot-shots client to solve the ephemeral nature of CI test runners, without slowing down your test execution.

📝 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

• How to Make Architecture Decisions

• Don't become an Engineering Manager

• How to Work With Anyone

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. Most Test Cases Are a Waste of Time, But Here’s What Good Testers Do Instead by Melvin Salazar

2. Maslow's Hammer and Three Lies QA Tells Itself by Filip Hric

3. Quality Isn't a Testing Problem by Alan Page

😂 And Finally,

Dev and Test Talks 🤣

📨 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)

Welcome to the 210th 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:

• Maslow’s Hammer and Three Lies QA Tells Itself

• Most Test Cases Are a Waste of Time, But Here’s What Good Testers Do Instead

• TypeScript Testing Patterns: Unit, Integration, and E2E Strategies That Scale

• Custom JMeter extension that simplifies both load testing setup

• Your AI Agent Has No Tests - Here’s How to Fix That in 5 Minutes

and more…

📚 Testing

Testing the “Yes-Man” in Your Pocket by Jeff Nyman

Another fascinating article from Jeff Nyman, this one is about Stanford-led study showing how today’s AI models, optimized for agreement, can subtly reinforce harmful behavior and it’s a sharp reminder that testing AI now means measuring real human impact and not just model accuracy.

Maslow's Hammer and Three Lies QA Tells Itself by Filip Hric

Filip Hric truly captures the growing unease in QA circles as AI reshapes development, pushing back on the comforting narratives and arguing that testing isn’t immune to the broader transformation already underway.

Quality Isn't a Testing Problem by Alan Page

Alan Page challenges the long-standing assumption that testing equals quality, arguing instead that quality is shaped by organizational systems, incentives, and feedback loops.

Anatomy of a deceptive "works on my machine" bug by Benjamin Bischoff

This is a nicely told deep dive by Benjamin Bischoff into a classic “works on my machine” bug that turns out to be anything but simple. This is a great reminder of how easily environment drift and small communication gaps can mislead even experienced team.

Most Test Cases Are a Waste of Time, But Here’s What Good Testers Do Instead by Melvin Salazar

Melvin Salazar pushes back on the comforting idea that more test cases equal better quality, arguing instead that real value comes from risk-driven thinking, exploration, and challenging assumptions rather than just coverage.

You Can’t Spell “Testability” Without “Stability” by Joshua Bihun

Joshua Bihun explores the all-too-familiar frustration of flaky tests and inconsistent QA results and shares how the real culprit is often an unstable test environment rather than poor testing itself.

🔍 Software Testing

⚙️ Automation

TypeScript Testing Patterns: Unit, Integration, and E2E Strategies That Scale by Matthias Bruns

Matthias Bruns walks through how testing in TypeScript shifts the focus from catching basic errors to building a scalable, layered testing strategy. It’s a practical take on balancing types with tests, though it does make you wonder how many teams truly reduce test volume as suggested or just keep adding more on top of what TypeScript already guarantees.

Your AI Agent Has No Tests - Here's How to Fix That in 5 Minutes by Kang

Kang introduces a testing framework for AI agents that shifts focus from prompt or output validation to how tools are chosen, errors handled, and decisions made in between.

Beyond Pass and Fail: Building a Playwright Observability Layer by Viatsheslav (Slavik) Pashanin

Viatsheslav reframes Playwright from a simple pass/fail testing tool into a full-fledged observability layer, treating tests as signals for different audiences.

🔍 Test Automation

💨 Performance

I Built a Single JMeter Jar That Handles Dynamic Thread Group, Auto Correlation, and Boundary Extraction — Here’s How It Works by Jagadeesh Sakamuri

Jagadeesh Sakamuri has created a custom JMeter extension that simplifies both load testing setup and the correlation process, aiming to replace cluttered configurations with a more bearable, almost “one-click” approach.

🔍 Performance Testing

🌞 Accessibility

Accessibility Regression Testing With XCUI by Mark Steadman

Mark Steadman shows how Xcode 15’s built-in performAccessibilityAudit() makes automated accessibility checks in XCUI tests.

Mobile app accessibility under EN 301 549 v4.1.0

This piece walks through how the upcoming EN 301 549 update reshapes mobile accessibility testing by aligning more closely with WCAG 2.2, clarifying long-standing ambiguities (like how to treat web views), and expanding what teams are expected to validate across app layers.

🔍 Accessibility Testing

🛠️ Resources & Tools

AgentProbe — Playwright for AI Agents — test what your agent DOES, not what it SAYS. YAML-first, 2900+ tests.

Dynamic Thread Group & Auto Correlation — Dynamic Thread Group, Auto Correlation, and Boundary Extractor for JMeter

📝 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

• Systems Thinking

• What is OAuth?

• How I Use Claude Code

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. Testing LLM Outputs: A Hands-On Guide to DeepEval Metrics by Serhii Smetanskyi

2. Who Tests the Tests? AI, QA, and the Verification Paradox by Irfan Mujagić

3. From Prompt to Passing Test: A Complete Agentic QA Session by Ivan Davidov

😂 And Finally,

The real guinea pigs of the IT world now! 🤣

📨 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)

Welcome to the 209th 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:

• Who Tests the Tests? AI, QA, and the Verification Paradox

• Trust in Test Planning

• Testing LLM Outputs: A Hands-On Guide to DeepEval Metrics

• Designing Realistic Load Test Scenarios with k6

• Test Your Website with Just a Keyboard: The Easiest Accessibility Check

and more…

📚 Testing

Put quality at the centre of what you do – A Review of ‘Out of the Crisis’ by W. Edwards Deming by Mike Harris

Mike Harris takes a reflective revisit of Out of the Crisis and explores how Deming’s ideas, especially the feedback loop of continuous improvement and shared purpose can shape a team’s approach to quality.

Who Tests the Tests? AI, QA, and the Verification Paradox by Irfan Mujagić

In this piece Irfan Mujagić tackles the awkward loop created when AI generates tests and then we’re told to “verify with more tests”. As Irfan points out We should be focusing on adversarial thinking, domain knowledge, and intentional review rather than piling on automation.

The Knowledge Void Eats Quality for Breakfast by Gil Zilberfeld

Gil Zilberfeld explores the “Knowledge Void” that creeps in when AI-generated code and tests outpace our understanding on what systems actually do and how they’re validated.

Trust in Test Planning by Jesper Ottosen

Jesper Ottosen reframes test planning as less about generating artifacts and more about building trust, alignment, and shared understanding.

🔍 Software Testing

⚙️ Automation

Testing LLM Outputs: A Hands-On Guide to DeepEval Metrics by Serhii Smetanskyi

Serhii Smetanskyi takes a deep dive into making LLM testing feel a bit more like real engineering by plugging “LLM-as-judge” metrics into familiar pytest workflows.

Why Every Testing Tool Generates Different JUnit XML by Dennis Martinez

Dennis Martinez digs into the world of JUnit XML, showing how a “standard” with no real spec still manages to power useful tooling. It’s a nice reminder that messy formats can still be valuable.

From Prompt to Passing Test: A Complete Agentic QA Session by Ivan Davidov

Lean how a well-instructed AI agent can go from vague prompt to fully working test suite. Ivan Davidov has written series of articles exploring the app, generating code, and wiring everything into CI.

🔍 Test Automation

💨 Performance

Designing Realistic Load Test Scenarios with k6 by Indra A.

Indra A shares how to design K6 load test step by step and shows how modeling ramp-up, peak periods, and “think time” should be used.

🔍 Performance Testing

🌞 Accessibility

Test Your Website with Just a Keyboard: The Easiest Accessibility Check

This article makes a strong case for the simplest possible accessibility audit by putting your mouse away and navigating with just a keyboard is a fast way to uncover surprisingly common usability failures that affect far more users than most teams assume.

Accessible web testing with Cypress and Axe Core by Vitaly Skadorva

Vitaly Skadorva has written a practical guide to include accessibility into your test suite with Cypress and axe-core.

🔍 Accessibility Testing

🛠️ Resources & Tools

AI-Test-Case-Generator-Eval — AI-powered tool for evaluating LLM-generated test cases across multiple models with human and LLM-as-judge scoring

📝 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

• How Programmers Spend Their Time

• The secret to getting promoted

• Software Performance Engineering

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. Stop Writing API Tests Manually — Let Your OpenAPI Spec Do the Work by David Mello

2. Quality Engineering with AI by Callum Akehurst-Ryan

3. End-to-End Testing with Playwright: Complete Guide with Page Object Model by Satish Reddy Budati

😂 And Finally,

AI Agents and QA 🤣

📨 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)

Welcome to the 208th 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:

• Stop Writing API Tests Manually — Let Your OpenAPI Spec Do the Work

• Quality Nonsense: Are We All Just A Bundle of Skills?

• End-to-End Testing with Playwright: Complete Guide with Page Object Model

• The Hidden Cost of 100% Code Coverage

• Quality Engineering with AI

and more…

✨ Featured

The Quality Leadership Academy: Take your leadership skills to the next level

Most QA executives are trained to execute tests. Few are trained to lead a software testing strategy. The Quality Leadership Academy (QLA), founded by PractiTest, is a selective professional development program designed to bridge the gap between technical testing and strategic leadership.

Built for current or aspiring QA executives, the Academy moves beyond task management to focus on risk-based thinking, business-aligned KPIs, and leading a high-impact software testing strategy.

Apply now, for Free!

📚 Testing

Quality Nonsense: Are We All Just A Bundle of Skills? by Judy Mosley

A reflective piece by Judy Mosley built around the podcast Shell Game, exploring hands-on experiments with AI and how those experiences shift from curiosity to quiet unease about where humans fit in.

🔍 Software Testing

⚙️ Automation

Quality Engineering with AI by Callum Akehurst-Ryan

This is a practical look at how AI is reshaping software testing. Callum Akehurst-Ryan shares that how quality teams need to adapt quickly by focusing less on brittle, low-level tests and more on behaviour, risk, and real-world outcomes.

Stop Writing API Tests Manually — Let Your OpenAPI Spec Do the Work by David Mello

A compelling case by David Mello for treating your OpenAPI spec as the source of truth for API testing, using tools like Schemathesis to generate broad, evolving test coverage instead of relying on hand-written or AI-generated cases.

AI-Assisted Cypress CI: Detecting Selector Drift and Proposing Fixes Automatically by Raju Dandigam

Raju Dandigam shares a neat walkthrough of using AI to assist with analyzing failures and suggesting fixes directly in pull requests within your CI pipeline.

End-to-End Testing with Playwright: Complete Guide with Page Object Model by Satish Reddy Budati

Satish Reddy Budati shares a comprehensive guide to building production-ready end-to-end testing with Playwright, covering everything from structure and reliability to scaling across browsers and CI pipelines.

47 Failed. 3 Passed. A Senior QA Engineer’s Honest Week With AI. by Jalexander

This is a candid week-in-the-life experiment of letting AI take over QA work. I found the comparison to a “non-learning junior engineer” particularly interesting as it leaves us wondering whether the real skill shift isn’t using AI more, but knowing exactly where to stop trusting it.

Evolving POM: From Page Objects to Agent-Friendly Design by Martín Marchetto

Martín Marchetto makes a compelling case that classic Playwright POM isn’t obsolete but needs a rethink for the agent era, showing how exposing test actions as “tools” can bridge the gap without a full rewrite.

The Hidden Cost of 100% Code Coverage by Kurdish Gupta

Kurdish Gupta shares a sharp critique of the obsession with 100% code coverage, arguing that it often creates a false sense of safety while quietly draining time, morale, and momentum from teams that should be focused on shipping.

Playwright Actions: How to Click, Type and Interact with Web Elements by Aparna Mishra

This is a beginner-friendly walkthrough by Aparna Mishra on what comes after Playwright locators, shifting the focus toward actually interacting with the UI and validating behavior so tests start to resemble real user flows.

🔍 Test Automation

💨 Performance

Black Friday: Would You Choose the Right Performance Test? by Oleh Koren

In this article Oleh Koren, uses a simple poll to highlight how often performance testing concepts get blurred, then zooms in on spike testing as the one teams tend to overlook despite it being closest to real production chaos.

Automating JMeter Script Generation from HAR Files for Parallel API Workflows by Sandhya badukonda

This article walks through a practical workaround for turning HAR files into realistic Apache JMeter scripts, using automation to preserve timing and parallelism without the usual manual pain.

🔍 Performance Testing

🌞 Accessibility

Three accessibility assumptions

This piece challenges some of the tidy mental models we rely on when working with accessibility tools, arguing that the DOM, accessibility tree, and screen reader output are far less definitive than they appear in debugging views.

🔍 Accessibility Testing

🛠️ Resources & Tools

AgentProbe — Define expected behaviors in YAML. Run them against any LLM. Get deterministic pass/fail results. Catch regressions before your users do.

Schemathesis — automatically generates property-based tests from your OpenAPI or GraphQL schema and exercises the edge cases that break your API.

📝 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

• Mitchell Hashimoto's AI Adoption Journey

• How to Beat Decision Fatigue

• The Shift to Managing Managers

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. The Test Pyramid Was a Lie (Or at Least an Oversimplification) by Phil Hargreaves

2. Writing tests with Claude Code - part 1 - initial results by Bas Dijkstra

3. The Testing Skill Gap Your Competitors Are Exploiting by Matt Lewis

😂 And Finally,

"AI-first" strategy and the bug count 🤣

📨 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)

Welcome to the 207th 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:

• The Testing Skill Gap Your Competitors Are Exploiting

• How to Build a Scalable API Automation Framework Using Java, RestAssured, and JUnit 5

• Escaped Defect Rate: Quality is about hard truths

• Testing non-predictive systems: letting the tests teach you

• Your K6 Tests Are Lying to You (And It’s Not K6’s Fault)

and more…

📚 Testing

The Test Pyramid Was a Lie (Or at Least an Oversimplification) by Phil Hargreaves

Phil Hargreaves takes a thoughtful look at the test pyramid and challenges the idea of optimizing for test layers and coverage, and instead explores a more practical workflows that matter most to users.

Testing non-predictive systems: letting the tests teach you by Peter Wilson

What does testing looks like when there’s no clear answers? Peter Wilson talks about how to implement an iterative “testing cycle” that gradually evolves showing how testers build confidence in system behaviour over time rather than simply verifying expected outputs.

The Testing Skill Gap Your Competitors Are Exploiting by Matt Lewis

Matt Lewis argues that the biggest testing risk today isn’t poor automation but it’s losing the investigative, business-aware thinking that experienced testers bring to the table.

How to Measure E2E Test Coverage Without a Standard Tool by Josphine J.

Josphine tackles the deceptively simple question of E2E test coverage and explains why standard coverage tools don’t work for E2E tests, and what to measure instead.

Escaped Defect Rate: Quality is about hard truths, not ego boosts by Alison

Alison blends QA concepts with personal reflection to explore how decisions that look “correct” by conventional metrics can still fail once they reach real world.

🔍 Software Testing

⚙️ Automation

Migrating From Cypress.env To cy.env and Cypress.expose Methods by Gleb Bahmutov

Gleb Bahmutov shares a notable change coming in Cypress v16 that rethinks how environment variables and secrets are handled during tests.

It’s clearly a bug, but what is the bug exactly? by Joep Schuurkes

Joep Schuurkes unpacks a puzzling Playwright issue and walks through the debugging process and explains how dynamic test names combined with Playwright’s double evaluation of test files can lead to confusing behaviour.

AI-Assisted Development is the New Test Automation by Stuart Thomas

This article by Stuart Thomas draws an interesting parallel between the rise of test automation and today’s surge in AI-assisted development, arguing that the real shift isn’t about tools replacing engineers but about how engineers choose to use them.

Writing tests with Claude Code - part 1 - initial results by Bas Dijkstra

Bas Dijkstra explores what happens when an LLM is asked to generate an entire API test suite from scratch, walking through the Bas ’s experiment generating 23 REST tests in minutes and then evaluating their real value.

Your API Tests Are Passing. That’s the Problem. by Gil Zilberfeld

This article introduces the idea of the “Green Mirage,” and through simple API testing examples, Gil Zilberfeld explores how stronger assertions and clearer thinking about what a test actually proves can reveal hidden gaps.

How to Build a Scalable API Automation Framework Using Java, RestAssured, and JUnit 5 by Ameya Sawant

Ameya Sawant provides a walks through building a scalable API automation framework with Rest Assured, JUnit 5, and Apache Maven.

🔍 Test Automation

💨 Performance

Your K6 Tests Are Lying to You (And It’s Not K6’s Fault)

This piece takes a thoughtful look at how load testing with k6 can quietly mislead teams if they misunderstand its virtual user model, especially the common assumption that VUs equal real users.

🔍 Performance Testing

🛠️ Resources & Tools

QaSkills.sh — is an open source directory of curated QA testing skills designed for AI coding agents. You can install these skills into Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and 30+ other AI agents to give them expert QA knowledge.

MCPLab — A tool to test and evaluate MCP servers and evaluating AI/LLM tool integrations.

📝 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

• Ideas Over Implementation

• Three Bad Managers

• Top 10 web hacking techniques of 2025

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. Software Quality is Heading Toward a Revolution by Josh Grant

2. Persona-based testing with AI agents: find the UX gaps your E2E tests can't see

3. From Dev Branch to Production: A QA Engineer’s Guide to CI/CD Pipelines by Himanshu Pathak

😂 And Finally,

AI is about to go to PIP 🤣

📨 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)

Welcome to the 206th 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:

• Software Quality is Heading Toward a Revolution

• Goal-Based Agentic Testing for Mobile Applications

• Cypress cy.prompt() and the Two Competing Visions for AI-Powered Testing

• Chaos Engineering for ML: What Happens When Your Model Lies?

• Forget WebDriverManager: Use Selenium Manager Instead

and more…

✨ Featured

These three BrowserStack AI Agents are changing how website QA works

Catch hidden accessibility gaps, get code-level fix guidance straight from your DOM, and reduce visual review time by 3x.

BrowserStack's Website Scanner now has agents that don't just flag problems, they investigate them. Three agents, one scan, and fewer questions when it’s time to ship.

Scan your website for free!

📚 Testing

Why Your Transition to Quality Engineering May Fail by Barry Ehigiator

A thoughtful exploration by Barry Ehigiator on why many teams enthusiastically adopt the language of Quality Engineering yet struggle to see real improvement, arguing that the issue usually isn’t QE itself but how superficially implemented.

We Need to Stop Queueing Quality by Jitesh Gosai

Using a restaurant kitchen analogy, Jitesh Gosai explores why the familiar “In Test” column on team boards can unintentionally create bottlenecks, handoffs, and late feedback, even when everyone looks busy.

Software Quality is Heading Toward a Revolution by Josh Grant

Josh Grant shares an interesting reflection on how easily product quality can slip even at companies that pride themselves as pioneers of Quality.

🔍 Software Testing

⚙️ Automation

Goal-Based Agentic Testing for Mobile Applications by Russell Morley

Russell Morley shares how to approach goal-based agentic testing for mobile apps, where tests focus on the outcome like successfully logging in rather than rigid step-by-step scripts that tend to break when UI details change.

Persona-based testing with AI agents: find the UX gaps your E2E tests can't see

A thoughtful look at persona-based AI testing, where an agent explores a product like a real user and identify UX gaps traditional tests never catch.

From Dev Branch to Production: A QA Engineer’s Guide to CI/CD Pipelines by Himanshu Pathak

Himanshu Pathak details a walkthrough of how modern CI/CD pipelines guide code from development to production, highlighting the testing, security checks, and environment promotions that keep rapid releases safe.

Cypress cy.prompt() and the Two Competing Visions for AI-Powered Testing by Gurudatt S A

Gurudatt S A takes a deep dive comparing Cypress embedding AI directly into the runner with cy.prompt() to translate plain-English steps into cached, deterministic tests, and Playwright giving external agents full control of the browser.

Forget WebDriverManager: Use Selenium Manager Instead by Andrii Olieinik

A helpful reminder that one of Selenium’s most popular utilities has quietly become unnecessary, as Andrii Olieinik points out that Selenium 4.6+ now includes its own built-in driver management through Selenium Manager. Learn how to use them in your test automation.

🔍 Test Automation

💨 Performance

Chaos Engineering for ML: What Happens When Your Model Lies? by Irfan Mujagić

Irfan Mujagić introduces “model fault injection,” a testing mindset borrowed from chaos engineering that deliberately corrupts ML outputs to see how the rest of the system reacts.

k6-cucumber-steps: Run K6 Performance Tests with Cucumber BDD Syntax by Chetachi (Paschal) Enyimiri

In this guide, Chetachi (Paschal) Enyimiri shares how to use k6-cucumber-steps to write performance tests for k6 using familiar Cucumber-style Gherkin syntax.

Load testing a Consumer that uses RabbitMQ using JMeter

This article walks through how to load test a RabbitMQ consumer by simulating message production with Apache JMeter and monitoring how the consumer behaves under pressure.

🔍 Performance Testing

🛠️ Resources & Tools

Contrast Checker — Checks contrast for WCAG compliance

vcrpy — Automatically mock your HTTP interactions to simplify and speed up testing

JSON Viewer — An online JSON viewer that lets you minify, beautify, and load JSON from a file.

📝 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

• Soft-Skill Upgrades for Tech Leaders

• The Deletion Test

• How to coach your team (without making them defensive)

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. How We Made Our E2E Tests 12x Faster by Alexandru NEAMTU

2. Investigating AI: Playwright-Test-Planner and Playwright-Test-Generator by T.J. Maher

3. When Test Cases Aren’t Enough: Why I Use Stories by Peter Wilson

😂 And Finally,

Vibe Coder Mortal Enemy 🤣

📨 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)

Welcome to the 205th 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:

• Measuring QA Success: Beyond Test Counts and Bug Reports

• Validating JSON API Responses in k6

• Using the browser console for accessibility testing

• Clean API tests with cypress aliases

• How We Made Our E2E Tests 12x Faster

and more…

✨ Featured

The 2026 State of AI in Software Testing

Learn how AI is being used in practice, where teams are seeing real gains, how QA roles are beginning to shift as adoption grows and a lot more.

AI is now part of most QA workflows, but outcomes vary widely. BrowserStack’s 2026 AI in Software Testing report is based on a global survey of more than 250 software testing leaders.

Download the report!

📚 Testing

Quality Insight: Exploratory Testing Life by Judy Mosley

With AI at the centre stage shifting career paths, many of us feel this strange anxiety. Judy Mosley takes a look with the lens of an “Explorer” mindset and shares reflections on solo testing, community conversations, and the messy reality of modern tech work.

When Test Cases Aren’t Enough: Why I Use Stories by Peter Wilson

Peter Wilson explores how storytelling can ground testing in real-world context, especially when working with complex or AI-driven systems where “correct” isn’t always obvious, and even developers can’t predict the outcome.

Why Test, Test What, Then How? by James Thomas

This piece is a thoughtful walk-through by James Thomas on what intentional testing looks like in an AI oriented, distributed system.

Measuring QA Success: Beyond Test Counts and Bug Reports by Joshua Bihun

Joshua Bihun takes a hard look at the way many teams measure QA and makes a compelling case that metrics such as test and automation counts, bug counts often fail to reflect meaningful quality.

🔍 Software Testing

⚙️ Automation

Investigating AI: Playwright-Test-Planner and Playwright-Test-Generator by T.J. Maher

This practical walkthrough by T.J. Maher puts three emerging Playwright AI agents called planner, generator, and healer. The article details how they can outline a test strategy, spin up a TypeScript page-object framework, and even try to patch broken tests using nothing more than a basic scenario.

Clean API tests with cypress aliases by Bart Vanherck

If you’ve ever wrestled with deeply nested .then() chains in Cypress API tests, Bart Vanherck shares a cleaner pattern built around aliases and .as(), showing how to store, reuse, and safely chain request responses.

How We Made Our E2E Tests 12x Faster by Alexandru NEAMTU

Alexandru NEAMTU shows how they improved Playwright test suite execution time from 90 seconds to only 7 seconds by using fast API logins, simplifying checks, and removing extra setup work.

Why Your Playwright Tests Are Still Flaky (And It’s Not Because of Timing) by Sourojit Das

As Playwright is all around this days, Sourojit Das challenges the common belief that switching to Playwright automatically eliminates flaky tests. he explains why instability persists even with auto-waiting and shows that the real causes often lie in system architecture, not the test framework.

When Your AI Deletes the Database: Why Testing LLM Applications Requires a Different Playbook

This article provides a walks through of a practical, layered approach to testing nondeterministic AI systems using semantic evaluation, small but meaningful test suites, and tight feedback loops.

🔍 Test Automation

💨 Performance

Validating JSON API Responses in k6

If you’re using k6 for load testing and mostly watching response times, this article walks through a comprehensive set of JSON validations you can add to your tests.

🔍 Performance Testing

🌞 Accessibility

Using the browser console for accessibility testing

Take a look at this practical introduction to using the browser console as a lightweight accessibility test tool, showing how a few small JavaScript snippets can instantly surface headings, landmarks, labels, focus order, and more issues.

🔍 Accessibility Testing

🛠️ Resources & Tools

Animate SQL — Visualize SQL queries online.

CSV SQL Tool — Run SQL queries on CSV files directly in your browser. No data leaves your browser. Fast, private, and easy to use.

📝 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

• Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

• Closing the Software Loop

• Software Performance Engineering: The Ideas I Keep Coming Back To

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. Playwright MCP Is Killing Traditional Test Automation, Here’s How SDETs Must Adapt in 2026 by Pramod Dutta

2. Let’s get Playwright with a few tests set up quickly by Melissa Fisher

3. Forget coverage; focus on risk by Stuart Thomas

😂 And Finally,

When you are asked to test in Prod 🤣

📨 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)

Welcome to the 204th 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:

• Accessibility Testing on Windows on Mac

• Session-Based Test Management

• A Field Guide to Not Overengineering Test Automation

• Your Automation Is Green. Your Risk Is Red

• Playwright MCP Is Killing Traditional Test Automation

and more…

📚 Testing

Forget coverage; focus on risk by Stuart Thomas

Code coverage can be a comforting but can become a misleading metric. Stuart Thomas argues against having just green dashboards and makes the case for a risk-first testing strategy that focuses on critical failure modes and outcomes.

Are You Testing Features or Testing Decisions? by Deepak Karn

Deepak Karn makes a subtle but powerful distinction between testing features and testing the consequences of the decisions behind them.

Session-Based Test Management by Ryan Craven

If you’ve ever struggled to explain what “a day of exploratory testing” actually covered, Ryan Craven takes a deep dive into Session-Based Test Management as a practical way to add structure, visibility, and metrics.

🔍 Software Testing

⚙️ Automation

Let’s get Playwright with a few tests set up quickly by Melissa Fisher

If you’ve been meaning to try Playwright but weren’t sure where to start, Melissa Fisher shares a walkthrough on just how quickly you can start a project and run the example tests.

Your Automation Is Green. Your Risk Is Red: The Dunning–Kruger Effect in software testing by Pricilla Bilavendran

In this article, Pricilla Bilavendran explores how the Dunning–Kruger effect quietly shapes software testing, from overconfidence in coverage and automation to leadership decisions.

unittest to pytest Migration: Fixtures and Async Patterns by Seojin Yoon

Moving from unittest to pytest? Seojin Yoon shares a walks through of a a real-world migration of 847 tests and shows exactly where the wins come from.

A Field Guide to Not Overengineering Test Automation by Irfan Mujagić

Irfan Mujagić shares how well-intentioned test automation quietly drifts into overengineering and offers a practical warning signs, three deceptively simple questions to ask before automating anything.

Eagle Eye: Turning Screenshot Review Into Deterministic QA by Andrew Orobator

“Eagle Eye” is a screenshot review system

Andrew Orobator details how subagents, retries, failure classes, and state matrices turn fuzzy screenshot QA into something far more useful and offers a practical blueprint for treating screenshot review as static analysis.

Playwright MCP Is Killing Traditional Test Automation, Here’s How SDETs Must Adapt in 2026 by Pramod Dutta

Pramod Dutta takes a look at why traditional Selenium suites are creaking under the weight of AI-generated code and how Playwright MCP flips the model by letting AI agents generate, run, and even clean up tests using the browser’s accessibility tree.

🔍 Test Automation

💨 Performance

The chart that lied on Monday by Gabriele Wayner

This is a sharp, experience-soaked reminder by Gabriele Wayner that how early low latency can hide the slow tail latency, retries, and rising cost per successful request that only show up under real load.

Using SharedArray with k6 by Marlo Henrique

This is a practical deep dive by Marlo Henrique into how SharedArray (and the experimental fs and csv modules) can reduce test data overhead in high-volume runs.

🔍 Performance Testing

🌞 Accessibility

Accessibility Testing on Windows on Mac by Tatyana Bayramova

While not targated at testers, this is still a very useful article by Tatyana Bayramova sharing how to start accessibility testing on MAC and Windows machine.

🔍 Accessibility Testing

🛠️ Resources & Tools

JSONGenerator.io — Generate JSON data structures for mock data.

SSR Checker — Quick and visual way to verify server-side rendering (SSR) on any web page.

📝 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

• Why Senior Engineers Let Bad Projects Fail

• A Personal AI Maturity Model (PAIMM)

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Measuring Engineering ROI

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. Building Your Testing Career Path by Ryan Craven

2. Playwright BrowserContext: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Configure It by Juan G. Vazquez Jr.

3. Test smart: how to solve dilemmas as QA? by Julia Kocbek

😂 And Finally,

The Real SDLC🤣

📨 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)

Welcome to the 203rd 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:

• Test smart: how to solve dilemmas as QA?

• The Illusion of Automation: When More Tests Don’t Mean More Quality

• What developers get wrong about testing

• TDD Was Never About Tests. AI Proved It.

• Implementing breakpoint tests that include system recovery

and more…

📚 Testing

Building Your Testing Career Path by Ryan Craven

Ryan Craven maps out the often-overlooked career landscape in testing, from junior roles to Staff, Principal, management, specializations, and even adjacent paths like product or DevOps, with a practical focus on how to move intentionally rather than drift.

Test smart: how to solve dilemmas as QA? by Julia Kocbek

Julia Kocbek shares a thoughtful look at life as a QA highlights three common traps and explores how they quietly derail good products.

What About Expected Results? by Jesper Ottosen

This thoughtful piece by Jesper Ottosen questions the long-standing habit of embedding expected results into every test step, arguing that in many cases it creates redundancy and subtly biases the person doing the testing.

Your Quality Engineering will be richer if you know how Quality Engineering originated by Mike Harris

In this article, Mike Harris takes a step back into 1950s Japan to revisit the roots of Quality Engineering, tracing Taguchi’s ideas on societal loss, variability, and shifting quality “left” as a way to build what the Mike calls long-term engineering memory.

What developers get wrong about testing by Maaike Brinkhof

Maaike Brinkhof has written a candid, thoughtful defense of context-driven, human-centered testing reminding us that while automation is powerful, it’s often the curious tester wandering into the unknown who finds the bugs that truly matter.

The Software Quality and Productivity Crisis Executives Won’t Address by Bob Marshall

This is a sweeping, data-heavy reflection from a 50-year industry veteran arguing that software’s real crisis isn’t technical but executive. Bob Marshall urges teams to reclaim ownership themeselves.

A Quality Czar Won’t Fix Your System by Alan Page

Quality rarely fails because no one owns it, but because the system quietly teaches teams what really matters when tradeoffs get uncomfortable.

This reflective piece from Alan Page uses Microsoft’s new “quality czar” role to explore a whether titles change outcomes, or whether the real signal comes the first time a deadline slips.

🔍 Software Testing

⚙️ Automation

TDD Was Never About Tests. AI Proved It. by Mpholoane Bapela

Mpholoane Bapela revisits Test-Driven Development through an AI-era lens, arguing that while tools like Copilot can now churn out tests and implementations in seconds, the real value of TDD was always the design clarity.

Playwright BrowserContext: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Configure It by Juan G. Vazquez Jr.

This is a practical deep dive by Juan G. Vazquez Jr. into Playwright’s BrowserContext that makes test isolation, parallelism, and auth handling.

The Illusion of Automation: When More Tests Don’t Mean More Quality

This article pushes back on the comforting idea that more automated tests automatically mean better quality, arguing instead that volume without strategy often creates noise, false confidence, and mounting maintenance costs.

🔍 Test Automation

💨 Performance

Implementing breakpoint tests that include system recovery by Zlatin Stanimirov

If you’ve never deliberately pushed your backend past its limits, Zlatin Stanimirov shares a walks through of classical breakpoint testing and then goes further with recovery validation using Node.js and Locust.

Introduction & Getting Started with k6

Get started with Performance testing using k6. This post give a glimpse of how to setup the K6 with basic scenario execution.

🔍 Performance Testing

🛠️ Resources & Tools

Login-C-Sharp — C# automation framework using Playwright + NUnit for login testing. Built entirely with GitHub Copilot prompts. Includes Page Object Model, CI/CD with GitHub Actions, and Allure reporting.

test-staged 🚫🧪 — Run only the tests that are related to your changes. Stop pushing broken code.

📝 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

• No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

• The Quiet Discipline of Great Engineering Teams

• The way I run standup meetings

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. Prompt Engineering a Playwright Test Results Dashboard by Martin Poole

2. The Trade-Offs Nobody Wants to Talk About in Testing by Brijesh DEB

3. The Page Object Model: A Tale of Taming Test Automation Chaos

😂 And Finally,

Vibe Coding Cycle 🤣

📨 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)

Welcome to the 202nd 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:

• When Automation Creates Confidence Instead of Safety

• Shifting Right

• The Trade-Offs Nobody Wants to Talk About in Testing

• Why AI won’t save your Flaky Tests

• The Page Object Model: A Tale of Taming Test Automation Chaos

and more…

📚 Testing

Shifting Right by David Wardlaw

David Wardlaw makes a interesting case that real software quality can only be judged in production, and argues for “shifting right” by using monitoring, observability, and user behaviour data to spot issues.

When you outsource testing to the AI, you lose the ability to understand your system by Patrick Prill

As AI is writing more and more code, Patrick Prill reminds us that while AI might be able to write dev and test code, engineers still need to stay deeply involved especially where the cost of not really knowing how things work is far higher than a passing test suite.

The Trade-Offs Nobody Wants to Talk About in Testing by Brijesh DEB

In this piece, Brijesh DEB digs into why testing so often loses budget battles, not because quality doesn’t matter, but because its value is framed in risk.

Why AI won't save your Flaky Tests by Bart Vanherck

Bart Vanherck shares why flaky tests are less a nuisance and more an honest signal about deeper design and reliability issues, and why papering over them with AI “self-healing” tools can quietly make things worse.

My Philosophy on Quality Assurance by Joshua Bihun

Often times people assume that QA is a gatekeeping function. Joshua Bihun offers a thoughtful reframing of QA as a confidence-building practice, walking through how good QA helps overall teams.

Additionally, Sandeep Kaur Pama has also written about Why Quality Needs Systems Thinking, Not Just More Testing

🔍 Software Testing

⚙️ Automation

When Automation Creates Confidence Instead of Safety

This article takes a hard look at how test automation can quietly optimise for green dashboards and reassurance rather than actually surfacing the risks that cause real production failures.

Prompt Engineering a Playwright Test Results Dashboard by Martin Poole

Martin Poole shares a story of building a home-grown Playwright results dashboard, driven by a very real reporting pain and a lot of patient iteration with LLMs.

Automation Test Data Approach and Solution by Deepak Karn

Deepak Karn walks us through why test data is often the hidden bottleneck in automation frameworks, breaking it down into creation, population, and validation, with practical examples from both backend and UI-driven approaches.

Secure Credential Management in Playwright by Sajith Dilshan

This is a thorough, security-first walkthrough by Sajith Dilshan on how to handle credentials in Playwright without ever hardcoding secrets, from local development right through DevOps pipelines.

How we migrated our entire E2E testing infrastructure to Playwright by Liron Arad

Liron Arad shares a detailed case study of a SaaS team’s move from a low-code E2E tool to Playwright, explaining how they rebuilt their entire testing stack in under three months.

The Page Object Model: A Tale of Taming Test Automation Chaos

This article revisits the Page Object Model through a very relatable automation failure story, then carefully explains how POM (and Page Factory) reduce breakable tests by separating page structure from test intent.

🔍 Test Automation

🛠️ Resources & Tools

talk2dom — Locate web elements using natural language. Powered by LLM. Works with Selenium

JMeter MCP Server — Supercharge your JMeter performance testing with AI-driven orchestration and analysis.

📝 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

• Managing up as a Software Engineer

• Prioritize Relatively

• Getting Real With LLMs

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. Test Scenario vs Test Case – Everything You Need to Know by Jeslyn Stiles

2. Awesome QA Prompt: Using AI to Make Testing Work Better

3. Shift-Left Testing Failed. Here’s What Comes Next. by Pavan Kumar

😂 And Finally,

"Bub fix" 🤣

📨 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)