Hello there! 👋

Welcome to the 203rd 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:

• Test smart: how to solve dilemmas as QA?

• The Illusion of Automation: When More Tests Don’t Mean More Quality

• What developers get wrong about testing

• TDD Was Never About Tests. AI Proved It.

• Implementing breakpoint tests that include system recovery

and more…

📚 Testing

Building Your Testing Career Path by Ryan Craven

Ryan Craven maps out the often-overlooked career landscape in testing, from junior roles to Staff, Principal, management, specializations, and even adjacent paths like product or DevOps, with a practical focus on how to move intentionally rather than drift.

Test smart: how to solve dilemmas as QA? by Julia Kocbek

Julia Kocbek shares a thoughtful look at life as a QA highlights three common traps and explores how they quietly derail good products.

What About Expected Results? by Jesper Ottosen

This thoughtful piece by Jesper Ottosen questions the long-standing habit of embedding expected results into every test step, arguing that in many cases it creates redundancy and subtly biases the person doing the testing.

Your Quality Engineering will be richer if you know how Quality Engineering originated by Mike Harris

In this article, Mike Harris takes a step back into 1950s Japan to revisit the roots of Quality Engineering, tracing Taguchi’s ideas on societal loss, variability, and shifting quality “left” as a way to build what the Mike calls long-term engineering memory.

What developers get wrong about testing by Maaike Brinkhof

Maaike Brinkhof has written a candid, thoughtful defense of context-driven, human-centered testing reminding us that while automation is powerful, it’s often the curious tester wandering into the unknown who finds the bugs that truly matter.

The Software Quality and Productivity Crisis Executives Won’t Address by Bob Marshall

This is a sweeping, data-heavy reflection from a 50-year industry veteran arguing that software’s real crisis isn’t technical but executive. Bob Marshall urges teams to reclaim ownership themeselves.

A Quality Czar Won’t Fix Your System by Alan Page

Quality rarely fails because no one owns it, but because the system quietly teaches teams what really matters when tradeoffs get uncomfortable.

This reflective piece from Alan Page uses Microsoft’s new “quality czar” role to explore a whether titles change outcomes, or whether the real signal comes the first time a deadline slips.

🔍 Software Testing

⚙️ Automation

TDD Was Never About Tests. AI Proved It. by Mpholoane Bapela

Mpholoane Bapela revisits Test-Driven Development through an AI-era lens, arguing that while tools like Copilot can now churn out tests and implementations in seconds, the real value of TDD was always the design clarity.

Playwright BrowserContext: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Configure It by Juan G. Vazquez Jr.

This is a practical deep dive by Juan G. Vazquez Jr. into Playwright’s BrowserContext that makes test isolation, parallelism, and auth handling.

The Illusion of Automation: When More Tests Don’t Mean More Quality

This article pushes back on the comforting idea that more automated tests automatically mean better quality, arguing instead that volume without strategy often creates noise, false confidence, and mounting maintenance costs.

🔍 Test Automation

💨 Performance

Implementing breakpoint tests that include system recovery by Zlatin Stanimirov

If you’ve never deliberately pushed your backend past its limits, Zlatin Stanimirov shares a walks through of classical breakpoint testing and then goes further with recovery validation using Node.js and Locust.

Introduction & Getting Started with k6

Get started with Performance testing using k6. This post give a glimpse of how to setup the K6 with basic scenario execution.

🔍 Performance Testing

🛠️ Resources & Tools

Login-C-Sharp — C# automation framework using Playwright + NUnit for login testing. Built entirely with GitHub Copilot prompts. Includes Page Object Model, CI/CD with GitHub Actions, and Allure reporting.

test-staged 🚫🧪 — Run only the tests that are related to your changes. Stop pushing broken code.

📝 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

• No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

• The Quiet Discipline of Great Engineering Teams

• The way I run standup meetings

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. Prompt Engineering a Playwright Test Results Dashboard by Martin Poole

2. The Trade-Offs Nobody Wants to Talk About in Testing by Brijesh DEB

3. The Page Object Model: A Tale of Taming Test Automation Chaos

😂 And Finally,

Vibe Coding Cycle 🤣

📨 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)