There are many software development blogs out there, but many of them don't publish testing articles on a regular basis.
Also, I have noticed that some software developers don't read blogs written by software testers.
That is a shame because I think that we can learn a lot from them.
That is why I decided to create a newsletter that shares the best testing articles which I found during the last week.
Let's get started.
Technical Stuff
- Anti-patterns in test automation identifies eight anti-patterns that are often found from a "legacy" test suite. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I have seen that people use these when they are writing new automated tests. I recommend that you read this blog post because you don't want to be one of those people who use these anti-patterns.
- Appium From Scratch – Preparing for Automation – Part 1: Interrogating Your App is a very good blog post that describes how you can interrogate your Android and iOS applications with Appium. As always, James has added a lot of screenshots to this blog post, and that is why it is really beginner friendly.
- Applying software design patterns to your test automation code is a good blog post that explains why you should apply design patterns to your test code and provides some useful tips that help you to actually do it. This is a really important topic because test code is code, and you should treat it with the same respect as production code. In other words, you should refactor (and maybe rewrite) your tests on a regular basis.
- Avoid and testing boilerplate code using Java 8 lambdas describes how you can remove boilerplate code from your code base and test the outcome by using Java 8 lambdas. I like this blog post because it doesn't use mocks. What does it use then? Well, if you want to find out an answer to that question, you have to read the blog post.
- Introduction to Spring REST Docs provides a solid introduction to Spring REST Docs. Spring REST Docs is a handy library that helps you to document your REST API. If you want to document your REST API with Spring REST Docs, all you have to do is to write unit tests for your REST API with the Spring MVC Test framework. I recommend that you should read this blog post. I promise that it will be worth your time.
The Really Valuable Stuff
- BDD With Zelda describes the difference between behaviour-driven development implementation-driven development. The interesting thing is that it explains this difference by using the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess video game as an example. The cool thing is that it works really well! If you are wondering how you can create test cases that are implementation-agnostic, you should take a look at this blog post.
- Flaky Tests at Google and How We Mitigate Them describes how Google handles flaky tests. It was quite interesting to see that even Google is suffering from this problem, and I think that this blog post has some good ideas that you can use if your test suite has flaky tests.
- Ways to get to continuous delivery is an interesting post that describes how a software development team is doing continuous delivery without writing a lot of automated tests. It would be easy to say that this is irresponsible, but the thing is that I have huge respect for people who invest in writing clean code. Software development has a lot of "best practices", but I think that you can decide to igmore them, if your solution is a better option for you.
- Who Should be Afraid of Agile Testing? is a bit and and extremely hilarious blog post which identifies the persons who should be afraid of agile testing. However, since the author seems to be a decent person, he also provides tips that help these persons to get rid of their fears. If these persons follow the tips given on this blog post, they can transform themselves into useful team members (although I doubt that they will do so).
It's Time for Feedback
Because I want to make this newsletter worth your time, I am asking you to help me make it better.
- If you have any feedback about this newsletter, share your thoughts on the comment section.
- If you have written a blog post about automated testing or software testing, ping me on Twitter.
- You can share this blog post on Twitter.
P.S. If you want to make sure that you don't ever miss Java Testing Weekly, you should subscribe my newsletter.