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
The Flaky Tests Truce argues that sometimes we should retry a failed test and provides five tips that help us to write tests that serve the product.
Why F.I.R.S.T. Testing Still Wins After 20 Years explains why we should write tests which are fast, isolated, repeatable, self-validating, and timely.
Most Test Frameworks Are Over-Engineered identifies the hidden costs of an elegant in-house testing framework and provides four questions that help us decide whether our own test framework is a solution or a problem.
The Pyramid Isn’t Dead, You’re Just Not Using It Right is the first part of the "The Test Pyramid — Reimagined" series, and it argues that a test pyramid is still a useful tool for making tradeoffs between the number of different (unit, integration, API, and system) tests, the duration of our test run, and maintenance costs. Remember to check out the next parts of the series: Unit Tests – Your Code’s Loudest Critic, Integration Tests – Reclaiming the Middle, and The Line You Forgot to Draw.
Backend
Parallel Testing With Gradle and JUnit 5 describes how we can run our tests in parallel with Gradle when we using JUnit Jupiter, and identifies two issues that can cause problems for parallel test runs and explains how we can solve them.
Getting Started With MockK: The Setup describes how we can get the required dependencies with Maven and Gradle, and configure the system under test by using both manual and extension-based configuration.
UI / End-to-End
Confessions of a Recovering Selenium Developer explains why the author stopped using Selenium and replaced it with Playwright.
Intercept Everything: API Logging Middleware for Playwright describes how we can implement a component that includes both the HTTP request and response in the HTML report generated by Playwright.
What Would You Stop Doing When UI Tests Are Flaky? explores this QA interview question and identifies the common (wrong) answers, explains why candidates are answering to the wrong question, and describes how the author would answer to this question.
Playwright Sharding and Docker: How I Cut My Test Suite from 47 Minutes to 8 Minutes explains why something had to be done and describes how the author cut 39 minutes from the run time of their Playwright regression test suite by using Playwright sharding, Docker, and Github Actions.
When Offline Isn't Enough: Adding Network Throttling to Playwright explains how we can simulate network constraints such as high latency and restricted upload or download speeds with Playwright.