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 last day of the month.
Let's begin!
Test Design
QA Decisions, When to Automate Tests, and When to Walk Away: A Practical Guide for Effective Test Automation argues that "automate everything" isn't sustainable, identifies five questions which help us to decide what to automate, highlights five scenarios which must not be automated, and provides best practices which help us to decide what we should automate.
What Your Broken Test Suite Is Really Telling You identifies seven test automation problems which cost us both time and money, and helps us to solve these problems.
Why I'm Betting on LLMs for UI Testing introduces the author's vision for the future. The author argues that we should generate UI tests (as natural language) from the input data (specs, design documents, code, existing tests, and so on) by using an LLM and pass the generated tests to another LLM which runs them.
AI-Assisted Testing – The Rules and Roles is an interesting post which explains how AI can and cannot help testers (at least without compromising quality). Even though is article is written for testers, it's very relevant for developers as well. You see, many people want to use AI for writing automated tests, and if this isn't done right, it's a recipe for a disaster.
Backend
Manage Spring Boot Test Dependencies with Maven describes how we can manage our testing dependencies when we are using Spring Boot.
Testing an OpenRewrite Recipe explains how we can write automated tests for an OpenRewrite recipe which moves Kotlin source code files "closer to the root package" (which is the official recommendation).
Best Practices for Spring Boot Logging Test Configuration describes how we can create a logging configuration which helps us to figure out what went wrong if a test fails, and explains how we can verify that the expected log message is written to the log. This is useful if we want to ensure that our log contains the expected audit log messages.
UI / End-to-End
5 JavaScript Tricks for Cleaner, Faster Playwright Tests provides five tips which help us to write clean tests with Playwright.
How Agoda Uses Playwright Visual Testing to Prevent Brand Leakage in White-Label defines the terms: white-label and brand leakage, and describes how we can prevent brand leakage by writing visual tests with Playwright.
Milliseconds Make Millions: Turning Playwright Tests into Performance Audits is a practical blog post which describes how we can write performance tests with Playwright and Lighthouse.
vi.mock Is a Footgun: Why vi.spyOn Should Be Your Default is a thorough blog post which argues that we should use spies instead of mocks when we are writing our tests with Vitest and we want to replace the dependencies of the system under test with test doubles.