The Clean Test Automation Monthly is a monthly blog post that shares interesting or useful test automation content that 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
Test The Feature: Now With Examples provides code examples which demonstrate why end-to-end tests should concentrate on testing features instead of single API endpoints.
Your AI Generated 400 Tests. They All Pass. None of Them Catch the Bug That Ships to Production. identifies the pros and cons of AI generated tests, explains why AI generated tests can create false confidence, and describes how we can solve this issue by using better prompts and doing mutation testing.
Your Test Automation May Be Revealing Team Problems explains how test automation issues such as fragile tests and knowledge silos can be caused by organizational problems like poor collaboration and weak onboarding.
Stop Mocking Everything: The 3 Tests I Start With for a Service argues that we should stop mocking everything and introduces a three-test strategy that helps us write (or generate) better tests that test the behavior, not the implementation.
Backend
Spring Cloud Contract Is Coming Home: Introducing Stubborn Contract announces that Spring Cloud Contract is transitioning out of the Spring Cloud portfolio. The original author of the project will continue to support it under the name Stubborn Contract. This blog post identifies the reasons behind the change and explains what current users can expect during the migration.
Testing OAuth2 client login with mock-oauth2-server is a practical guide that helps us to write tests for Spring Boot OAuth2 client authentication. It explains how we can start a lightweight OAuth2 server when our integration tests are run and write tests for authentication flows without relying on external providers or heavy Docker containers like Keycloak.
Testing Spring MVC HandlerInterceptor provides a quick introduction to the HandlerInterceptor interface, describes how we can implement and register a custom HandlerInterceptor, and explains how we can write automated tests for our implementation.
Introduction to Spring MockMvc is a complete introduction to Spring MockMvc. It highlights the benefits of Spring MockMvc, identifies its key components, and describes how we can get the required dependencies with Maven and Gradle.
UI / End-to-End
Scaling Playwright‑BDD to 3,000+ Tests Without Losing Your Mind identifies six patterns that help us to write large BDD test suites that are both fast and maintainable.
Highly Scalable Test Data Management in Playwright describes how we can manage the test data of our Playwright tests by using fixtures.
What to Check When Your Playwright Test Passes Locally But Fails in CI explains why Playwright tests can fail in CI environments with blank screenshots and provides a step-by-step process that helps us to debug these failing tests.
Why Simple UI Tests Become Slow identifies some of the problems which slow down our UI tests and provides tips that help us to optimize the performance of our UI tests.
Page Object Model Is Not Enough: The 4 Layers Real Frameworks Use explains why using only the page object model is insufficient for large test suites and describes how we can write maintainable tests by implementing a four-layer test automation framework.
Playwright in Pictures: How Fixtures Work is a comprehensive tutorial which uses timeline charts to explain how Playwright fixtures work.