The Clean Test Automation Monthly is a monthly blog post that shares interesting or useful test automation content which I consumed during the current month. This blog post is always published on the first day of the "next" month.
Let's begin!
Test Design
My thoughts on 'self-healing' in test automation defines the term self-healing test automation and explains why it's a bad idea.
Rethinking Your Test Strategy for AI-Powered Features is a comprehensive article which explains what we have to take into account when we are testing AI-powered features.
You’re Not Meta: Build Fast Teams with Fast Tests argues that for most companies writing high-speed test suites is critical for ensuring that we can move forward as fast as possible.
Letting AI play my game explains how the author used AI for testing his game where a crossword builds the map of an old-school dungeon crawler.
You Climbed the Test Pyramid. Now Eat a Custard Slice introduces a new mental model that ignores technical scope and categorizes tests by the value they provide.
Eliminating Flaky Tests to End World Hunger explains why flaky tests are bad, identifies five reasons why our tests are flaky, and highlights seven strategies that help us to get rid of flaky tests.
The Flaky Test Files: The Case of the State Pollution descibes how state pollution causes flaky tests.
BDD Gherkin Guidelines for AI Coding and Testing announces the release of Gherkin Guidelines for AI. It's an open source context file that helps AI agents to write better Gherkin scenarios.
How and Why to Trace Use Cases and Tests explains why we must be able to link tests with use cases, describes how we can do it with a custom annotation, and announces the release of the AI Unified Process Navigator for IntelliJ plugin which makes the tracking process easier and faster (if we use IntelliJ Idea).
How to Handle Failing Tests Caused by a Known Bug argues that if a test case fails because of a bug that cannot be fixed immediately, we should configure our test framework to skip the failed test case.
Backend
Testing Elasticsearch. It just got simpler. describes how Elasticsearch 9.x and Testcontainers 2.x have made it easier to write tests for code which uses Elasticsearch.
UI / End-to-End
Signals Are Not Guarantees argues that many end-to-end tests contain assertions which are written on the wrong level, and explains how we can fix this problem.
Evolving POM: From Page Objects to Agent-Friendly Design describes how we can move from the classic page objects to page objects which can be leveraged by AI agents.
Migrating from Selenium to Playwright: The Complete Guide explains how we can evaluate the costs and risks of the migration, identifies four situations when the migration makes no sense, and describes how we can get the job done if we decide to do it.
Playwright Accessibility Testing: What axe and Lighthouse Miss identifies the accessibility issues which are missed by automated accessibility tools, describes how we can write better accessibility tests, and explains what must be tested manually.
My 2 Cents: I'll gladly spend them to stop staring at test logs describes how Trivago built an AI tool which analyzes test failures and publishes its analysis on Github Actions workflow summary.