Issue #193 : Software Testing Notes

Using Systems Thinking to Solve Complex QA Problems

Hello there! 👋

Welcome to the 193th 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:

• Using Systems Thinking to Solve Complex QA Problems

• Judgment Is the New QA Skill: How Testers and SDETs Can Thrive in the Age of AI

• Cousin locators in Playwright

• Stress Testing LLMs for Accuracy — Finding the Breakpoint

• Synthetic Data Generator

and more…

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✨ Featured

Share Your Voice in the State of Testing 2026

The State of Testing 2026 survey by PractiTest & Tea-Time with Testers is live!

Now in its 12th year, this global, highly cited report reveals key QA trends: from tooling and strategy to AI and careers. Take 10 minutes to share your experience and get early access to the full report:

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📚 Testing

When AI Ships the Bug: Who Pays? by Ryan Craven

AI testing has been in a buzz lately. But what happens when AI-generated tests miss critical bugs? Who’s responsible when when AI tools approve broken code? Through real-world cases, Ryan Craven explores how liability is quietly shifting from AI vendors to individual engineers and how it introduces a legal and ethical gray zones.

Judgment Is the New QA Skill: How Testers and SDETs Can Thrive in the Age of AI by Ryan Petersen

If you want to move beyond automation and become the kind of tester whose thinking can’t be replaced by AI, this article is for you. Ryan Petersen shares how great QA engineers apply human judgment to focus on what truly matters, define constraints and build trust.

How I Use Systems Thinking to Solve Complex QA Problems by Abhishek Verma

Instead of chasing broken tests or misconfigured environments, Abhishek Verma shows how mapping dependencies, identifying feedback loops, and asking deeper “why” questions can transform debugging into true system diagnosis.

🔍 Software Testing

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⚙️ Automation

Cousin locators in Playwright by Zoe Clegg

How to reliably target the right element when multiple identical components exist on a page? Zoe Clegg introduces the idea of “cousin locators” instead of relying on fragile indexes or dynamic IDs, using Playwright’s filtering capabilities.

Cypress Fixtures and Custom Commands: Streamlining Test Automation by Anuradha Liyanage

As your Cypress test suite scales, keeping tests clean and reusable becomes essential. Anuradha Liyanage shows how fixtures and custom commands help achieve that by separating data from logic and turning repeated steps into reusable functions.

Dictionary of Flaky Tests by Andrey Enin

From probabilistic flakiness scores to systemic flakiness and order dependencies, Andrey Enin takes a deep dive and unpacks the full vocabulary behind flaky tests.

How to Use JSON, ENV, and Dynamic Locators to Keep Tests Truly Data-Driven by Gunashekar R

Gunashekar R shares a practical guide to transforming monolith test scripts into a flexible, future-proof test framework by separating data, configuration, and logic using JSON files, environment variables, and dynamic locators.

Testing While Developing by Kevin Julián Martínez Escobar

This is a 5 part series detailing Test While Developing (TWD), a lightweight tool that lets you write and run tests directly inside your development environment.

Kevin walks us through setting up a small project, installing TWD, and adding its interactive sidebar to see your tests run live as you code.

Read next parts, (Part 2): Selectors, Assertions, and User Events, (Part 3): Mocking API Requests, (Part 4): Running Tests in CI, (Part 5): Collecting Coverage

Using AI in Playwright Tests by Philip Fong

Philip Fong explores an experimental approach to blending Playwright testing with AI-powered visual assertions by building a custom utility using OpenAI’s API to let tests verify UI elements directly from screenshots.

Synthetic Data Generator by Samwel Oliver

Samwel Oliver introduces DataGen, a Python library that creates realistic synthetic datasets for testing and analysis.

🔍 Test Automation

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💨 Performance

Stress Testing LLMs for Accuracy — Finding the Breakpoint by Karthic Muthuvelu

Instead of just measuring response time or throughput, Karthic Muthuvelu introduces a framework called “Accuracy Under Load” that benchmarks when an LLM’s reasoning quality starts to decline as concurrency rises.

🔍 Performance Testing

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🛠️ Resources & Tools

TWD — bringing tests directly into your development environment. Instead of running tests in a separate terminal, you can see results instantly in your browser’s sidebar while you code.

Datagen — A Python library for generating realistic synthetic datasets for testing, analytics, and machine learning experiments.

XPathSense — is an AI Automation Agent that intelligently scans web pages, identifies UI elements, and generates stable, human-readable XPaths and Page Object code using advanced AI models like Gemini or OpenAI.

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📝 List of Software Testers

Do you create content around Software Testing ? Submit yours blog details here and I will add it to the list.

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🎁 Bonus Content

📌 OTHER INTERESTING STUFF

• Running 1:1s for Engineers

• What Actually Happens When You Press ‘Send’ to ChatGPT

• Scaling Engineering Teams: Lessons from Google, Facebook, and Netflix

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. The New QA Mindset: Testing AI and LLMs by Vladimir Josifoski

2. Model-Based Testing with Playwright by Eleonora Belova

3. Switching from Web to Desktop Automation: 5 Things That Surprised Me by Darrold Dorsey

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😂 And Finally,

What we will do when AI takes our Jobs 🤣

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📨 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.

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Thanks to everyone for subscribing and reading!

Happy Testing!
Pritesh(@priteshusdadiya)