Software Testing Weekly – The Best Software Testing News

COMMENT

Welcome to — I can't believe I'm saying that — the 300th issue!

Which also marks the 6th anniversary of this newsletter! 🥳

It's been an extremely rewarding journey and I want to thank you all for your trust and support so far.

Happy testing! ❤️

NEWS

Five practical ways to use AI as a partner in Quality Engineering

If you want to know how you can use AI to aid your testing, Daria Tsion gives a few practical tips.

Furthermore, Callum Akehurst-Ryan describes how to Use AI to help teams shift testing left and Rahul Parwal describes the role of AI Agents in Testing.

Scale of Failure

Software failures hurt, but we can learn a lot from them. Jitesh Gosai demonstrates a scale to assess what you can learn from each incident.

Additionally, Maaret Pyhäjärvi describes The Results Gap in testing and Keith Klain outlines why Clarity is Courage.

Test Strategy Is Not a Shape

"Strategy is not about forcing the problem into a format. It's about understanding the problem before choosing the form."

Priscila Campos makes a valid point that there's more to setting a test strategy than just following a test pyramid.

On that note, Mona M. Abd El-Rahman sheds some light on How to adapt software testing without slowing the business.

Workshopping ideas for our future in Quality Engineering

How do you imagine a Quality Engineering role? Lisa Crispin has run a workshop on this and has shared all the insightful results with us.

What's more, Fathrial Muhamad explains the responsibilities of a Quality Engineer as part of Site Reliability Engineer.

AUTOMATION

AI and Testing: A Testing Example

Wondering how to practically approach testing AI systems? Jeff Nyman continues a super insightful series of articles, this time showing a full example of building a test script. You can also read a follow-up article about Refining tests.

Automation ( — ) Process ( = ) Chaos

Jasmine Slater explains why we should treat automation as a team strategy, not just tools, to see good results.

Also, a fair point by Betty Lin on Why Writing More Test Automation Doesn't Always Improve Quality, followed by the second part stating that Automation Maintains Stability. Quality Comes From Discovery.

Shifting Left — Our Storybook-First UI, Page-level Tests, MSW and the Storybook Test Harness

I always like to see practical examples of how teams approach test automation. In this case, Siwat Kaolueng describes in detail how they built their strategy around Storybook for testing web UI components.

Technical Debt in Test Automation

If there's software, there's tech debt. The same applies to test automation. Luis Osvaldo Serna Gomez explains what leads to it and how to address it.

Moreover, Ægir Máni points out The Thing Everyone Misses About Tests.

Where to place POM actions?

Even though you may be well aware of the idea of a Page Object Model, its implementation may differ in each case. Someone decided to ask the testing community for feedback on their approach. The discussion also continues in a twin thread.

TOOLS

Building Scalable Tests with Playwright Fixtures and Page Object Model

This is a helpful tip from Kailash Pathak on leveraging Playwright fixtures to create cleaner page objects and tests.

Moreover, Roshan Tiwari shows how to use Playwright with BDD — Understanding What Really Happens Under the Hood.

Common mistakes in REST API Testing with Rest Assured

Testing APIs? Erdoğan Paçacı has several pieces of advice on how to do it properly, with examples in REST-assured that apply to other test frameworks, too.

Speaking of Java-related tools, Elias Nogueira shares a helpful guide to implementing Custom JUnit 5 Extensions for Testing.

How to speed up slow Cypress Component Tests by running only affected tests in parallel

Now, that's interesting. Davide Cantelli created Affected Tests Runner — a tool that analyses code changes and runs only the tests affected by them. And it seems to work with multiple test tools, such as Jest, Playwright, Cypress, and more.

Playwright Smart Reporter with AI-powered failure analysis

Want to get better Playwright test reports? Gary Parker created an intelligent reporter with AI-powered failure analysis, flakiness detection, and performance regression alerts. You can explore its features in an interactive demo.

Why Appium Tests Pass Locally But Fail in CI

There's nothing more frustrating than tests behaving differently across environments. If that's the problem you're facing with Appium tests, Om Narayan has some good advice.

BOOKS

The origins of Quality Engineering lie in the prevention of product failures in Japan

There are many lessons we can learn from Japan's post-war focus on quality. This time, Mike Harris highlights the origins of Quality Engineering coming from Taguchi's Quality Engineering Handbook, as well as other resources.

VIDEOS

Selenium Creator Jason Huggins on New Automation Tool Vibium

Alex Khvastovich continues a great series of interviews on the future of testing, presenting a 1.5h discussion with Jason Huggins about Vibium and much more.

Similarly, Alex invited Debbie O'Brien to talk about the Future of Playwright, MCP, and AI-Driven Testing.

Software Testing Trends of 2026 — How the QA Landscape Has Changed

Wondering what you should pay attention to in testing this year? In this 9-minute video, Karthik KK shares his trends predictions.

Moreover, Kacper Ciepielewski presents The Only Test Automation Roadmap You Need in 2026 in 13 minutes.

AND...

Happened to many of us... 😂

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Issue 300 January 28th 2026