Hello there! 👋
Welcome to the 231st 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, there is a nice mix of practical testing ideas and bigger questions about how we test. We look at why regression suites need regular cleanup, where AI still struggles to find bugs, how Playwright can be used more effectively, and what testers can learn from infrastructure teams and the history of engineering. There is also some good accessibility content, including practical ways to test touch targets and use axe-core with Playwright.
So grab a coffee, take a few minutes, and have a look through this week’s picks. As always, I hope you find something useful to try, question, or share with your team.
✨ Featured
Join BrowserStack's QA Leadership Summit 2026 on Sep 23
A few years ago, the challenge was getting more testing done. Today, QA leaders are asking a different question: where does QA create the most value when software can be built and tested in entirely new ways?
Join BrowserStack's QA Leadership Summit 2026 on September 23 to hear how leaders and practitioners are approaching that shift in the real world. Explore the new QA Playbook!
🧭 Testing in Practice
Your Regression Suite Is a Graveyard and You're Still Adding Headstones by Nahla Davies
Regression suites get slower and less useful when flaky, outdated, and low value tests stick around. Nahla Davies looks at Test Impact Analysis, test quarantine, lower level checks, and test ownership as ways to keep the suite lean and trustworthy.
The testing we don’t see by Richard Adams
Richard Adams looks at how quality and infrastructure teams can share testing practices, improve documentation, and work together across the silos that often separate them.
No testing method can cover every situation. Yaron Assa explores what happens when scripted, risk based, or exploratory testing becomes more important than judgement and context.
Why AI Can Fix Bugs but Still Struggle to Find Them by Leonid Bugaev
AI can be good at fixing a known problem while still missing the bugs nobody has pointed it towards. Leonid Bugaev tests models including GLM-5.3-flash and explores the important gap between following instructions and deciding what needs investigating.
Creative teamwork for quality – A Review of “Sidewinder – Creative Missile Development at China Lake” by Ron Westrum by Mike Harris
What can a missile development team teach us about software quality? Mike Harris reviews Ron Westrum’s Sidewinder and connects its lessons on rapid feedback, customer contact, psychological safety, and teamwork with W. Edwards Deming’s ideas about quality.
Test Scenario vs Test Case: Understanding the Difference with Example Walkthroughs by Lyra Blair
Test scenarios describe what needs checking, while test cases describe how to check it. Lyra Blair explains where each fits, from business coverage and edge cases to regression testing, and shows how Gherkin can connect scenarios with automation.
⚙️ Automation Testing
Built My Playwright Framework for AI — Not Just With AI by Dipen Chavan
Getting AI to write Playwright tests is easy. Dipen Chavan shows what it takes to make those tests useful in a real Playwright and TypeScript codebase.
End-to-end (UI) Test Automation Stats that Matter by Courtney Zhan
Counting tests tells you little about whether your UI automation is actually useful. Courtney Zhan focuses on metrics such as execution time, pass rates, false alarms, user story coverage, and recent successful runs to measure the health of a test suite.
Let's turn a browser task into a Playwright test by Anton Gulin
Recording browser actions is not the same as testing whether the application did what it should. Anton Gulin shows how Playwright can turn a recorded flow into a real test by checking the resulting application state, using a broken Save button to demonstrate the difference.
Stop Writing Playwright Tests Like Scripts: Meet the Actor Pattern by Svetlana Tretjakova
Playwright tests can become hard to read when they are little more than lists of browser actions. Svetlana Tretjakova shows how the Actor Pattern moves the focus to users and business goals while keeping Playwright underneath, with Actors, Page Objects, and fixtures working together for more complex workflows.
🌞 Accessibility Testing
Using the browser console for accessibility testing - Part 2 by Russ Weakley
Accessibility issues can be hard to spot when you only look at the rendered page. Russ Weakley shows how a few browser console scripts can expose ARIA states, focus behaviour, tabindex values, accessible names, and other markup problems with instant visual feedback.
How to Test Touch Target Size for WCAG Compliance by Raghavendra Satish Peri
Tiny or crowded touch targets can make mobile interfaces frustrating, particularly for people with motor disabilities. Raghavendra Satish Peri shows how WCAG 2.5.8 and 2.5.5 apply to target sizes and how the Target Size Tester bookmarklet can quickly expose problems.
Accessibility Testing: What axe-core Cannot See by Oscar van der Leij
axe-core can find many accessibility problems, but it cannot tell you whether a person can complete an entire user journey. Oscar shows how to combine axe-core with Playwright to test meaningful states in CI, while keeping keyboard and screen reader checks in the manual testing mix.
🛠️ Resources & Tools
AgentInspect — Local evidence debugger and trajectory-test toolkit for TypeScript AI agents: inspect causal runs, catch wrong tool paths in CI, and share safe offline evidence.
AI-Assisted Playwright Quality Engineering Framework — AI-assisted Playwright Quality Engineering framework for TypeScript with BDD, UI, REST, GraphQL, mocking, Zod contracts, secure diagnostics, CI validation, and repository-aware AI agents.
📝 Software Testing Creators
Do you create content about software testing? Add your blog, website, or newsletter here, and I’ll add it to the list.
📨 Have Something to Share?
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And if you spot a mistake or have an idea for improving the newsletter, just hit reply.
🔎 Other Interesting Stuff
⭐ Last Week’s Most Read
I Tried Automating the Requirement-to-Test-Case Workflow. Here’s What Broke by Gayathri Bolineni
My ideal AI QA Workflow — more than test case generation by Adrian How
😂 And Finally
Thanks to everyone for subscribing and reading!
Happy Testing!
Pritesh
@priteshusdadiya