Issue #196 : Software Testing Notes
How to Build a QA Team Engineers Actually Want to Work With
Hello there! 👋
Welcome to the 196th 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 Complete Guide to RAG Quality Assurance: Metrics, Testing, and Automation
Testing types - beyond definitions
Run Cypress autotests in parallel for Allure report
Orchestrating our UI test suite with Maestro
Advanced Techniques for Real-World Performance testing with K6
and more…
✨ Featured
AI That Actually Understands Accessibility Testing (And Does It For You)
Here’s the problem with automated accessibility testing: your scanner says “alt text present,” but a screen reader reads out “image_final_v3.png.”
BrowserStack’s A11y Issue Detection Agent brings human-like intelligence into your workflow. It doesn’t just check for alt-text, it understands context. It can identify decorative vs. functional images, verify logical focus order, and more. It’s like having a WCAG expert built into your testing process.
📚 Testing
Why aren’t we Talking about Shift Right in Quality Engineering? by Callum Akehurst-Ryan
Callum Akehurst-Ryan shares an interesting look at how conversations around quality tend to fixate on shifting left while quietly ignoring the learning that comes from production release.
How to Build a QA Team Engineers Actually Want to Work With by David Ingraham
David Ingraham takes a thoughtful look at why quality often breaks down and how including QAs from the start can help with better feedback, stronger automation, and shared ownership by making quality a cultural habit.
Testing types - beyond definitions by Joep Schuurkes
Agreeing on rigid test definitions matters far less than staying curious and talking through what we actually intend to test. Joep Schuurkes does a nice job showing how context, culture, and even team habits all shape what we think about test types.
Quality is a Commercial Decision: The Case for Pragmatism by Stuart Thomas
This reflection from Stuart Thomas digs into the tension between aiming for zero defects and still needing to ship features, landing on a more pragmatic view of quality.
🔍 Software Testing
⚙️ Automation
Test Automation Framework or Test Automation Solution? by Oleksandr Romanov
Oleksandr Romanov takes a walks through the difference between a true reusable framework and a project-specific solution, showing that automation isn’t just about tooling but understanding which problem you’re actually trying to solve.
Orchestrating our UI test suite with Maestro by Prateek Prasad
By the end of the migration we reached 99%+ reliability, 50% cost reduction, and a 4x runtime speed up.
Prateek Prasad shows how that migrated from Espresso to Maestro and what kind of improvements they observed along the way.
The Complete Guide to RAG Quality Assurance: Metrics, Testing, and Automation by Irfan Mujagić
Learn how to test RAG pipelines with this great article by Irfan Mujagić. The article provides a detailed walks through of building sentence-window retrieval, smarter reranking, and automated scoring with the RAG.
Let AI Write Your Pytest Suite: A Practical Guide for SDETs by Sh Yin (Shene) Lim
Sh Yin (Shene) Lim explores how pairing OpenAI with Pytest can give API testing a helpful boost, letting AI draft the initial test cases while you focus on the parts that still need real engineering judgement.
Run Cypress autotests in parallel for Allure report by Ivan Smolyarov
Ivan Smolyarov details a way to speed up Cypress runs by adding simple parallelisation. The article also contains real world example of how it works and integrated with Allure reporting.
Kotest : Modern Testing in Kotlin: Test Styles, Mocking and Writing Tests by Nimit Raja
Nimit explains how to use Kotest and MockK to write Kotlin based automated tests for Android apps.
Anti-Patterns in Playwright People Don’t Realize They’re Doing by Gunashekar R
This guide dives into the subtle ways Playwright tests can quietly go wrong, from brittle .click() calls to hidden performance killers like hard waits and redundant reloads.
🔍 Test Automation
💨 Performance
Elevating Your K6 Tests: Advanced Techniques for Real-World Performance
From dynamic flows and conditional logic to custom metrics, thresholds, and xk6 extensions, this article shares a deep dive into making your load tests smarter, scalable, and CI/CD-ready.
The Day I Stopped Copy-Pasting Postman Tests into k6 by Ameya N.
Ameya N. shows how to turn existing Postman collections into full-blown k6 performance tests without rewriting a single line of code, all running seamlessly in GitHub Actions..
🔍 Performance Testing
🛠️ Resources & Tools
RedCoffee — is a Python Based CLI Tool that generates PDF Reports for analysis done using SonarQube Community Edition. Read more here
talk2dom — Locate web elements using natural language. Powered by LLM for reliable UI automation.
📝 List of Software Testers
Do you create content around Software Testing ? Submit yours blog details here and I will add it to the list.
🎁 Bonus Content
📌 OTHER INTERESTING STUFF
⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ
The First 5 Minutes of Bug Investigation: How to Do It Right by Vladimir Josifoski
Playwright Pro Tip: Stop Digging! Auto-Attach API Request/Response Data to Your HTML Reports. by Thananjayan Rajasekaran
Quality = Engineered + Experienced - explained with fountain pens. by Maaike Brinkhof
😂 And Finally,
📨 Send Me Your Articles, Tutorials, Tools!
Wrote something? Send links via Direct Message on Twitter @thetestingkit (details here). If you have any suggestions for improvement or corrections, feel free to reply to this email.
Thanks to everyone for subscribing and reading!
Happy Testing!
Pritesh(@priteshusdadiya)