Issue #214 : Software Testing Notes

94% Use AI for Testing. Only 12% Have Escaped the Chaos

Hello there! 👋

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…

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✨ 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.

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📚 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

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⚙️ 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

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💨 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

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🛠️ 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

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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

• 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

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😂 And Finally,

How Software Development Lifecycle works in real world 🤣

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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)