Here it is, the question is in the title/subject. For a warm up, here are some examples:

- Keep asking myself: Are my test scenarios steps and bug reports good enough?

- What if I do not find any bugs? Does that mean I did a poor job?

- What to do in situations when they do not give me enough time to complete all planned tests?

- How to test something if there are no requirements / no feature description / not enough details?

Admins, if this post contradicts any rules - I apologize and feel free to delete it.

Hey everyone I'm planning to get back to creating content on my YouTube channel, Being Human Tester, after taking a break.

I have explored and created content around PyTest automation in the past, but now I want to explore a wider range of topics from the software testing world.

Before deciding what to create next, I'd love to hear from people who are actually working, learning, and exploring software testing.

Here are some areas I'm currently interested in:

- Automation Testing: PyTest, Selenium, Playwright, framework architecture, and real-world automation challenges.

- AI in Software Testing: LLM testing, AI evaluations, RAG testing, agentic AI, and testing AI-powered applications.

- Exploratory Testing: Test design, critical thinking, investigation techniques, and finding bugs beyond predefined test cases.

- Python for Testers: Practical Python, problem-solving, coding patterns, and writing better automation code.

- Software Testing Fundamentals: Test strategies, debugging, risk-based testing, test coverage, and concepts that deserve more attention.

- Open Source & Testing: Exploring testing tools, contributing to open-source projects, and building tools for testers.

- Performance & API Testing: Practical approaches, challenges, and things testers should understand beyond basic execution.

But these are just a few ideas. I'm open to exploring topics beyond this list as well.

I want to ask the testing community a few things:

1. What topics in software testing would you genuinely like to learn more about?

2. What concepts do you find difficult to understand through existing learning resources?

3. Is there any area of testing that you think deserves more practical and detailed content?

At this stage I'm not trying to decide the video format or structure just yet. As of now I want to identify the topics worth exploring.

Would love to hear your suggestions, experiences, and even unpopular opinions.

I work on a team that manages customers. Our customers are software testers. Mostly automated testing, but there’s a cohort of manual testers in our customer base too. The people on my team have zero-to-very-little technical expertise. I’m curious to hear from the community on some best books/courses to take that could help them get into the mind of a tester, learn more about what testers do, how to think like a tester, what’s important to testers, learn the terminology etc etc. They don’t necessarily have to learn to code, but I think they should understand the space they are in, the customers they are serving, and at least be able to hold relevant conversations with our customer base. Thank you!

I’m the only QA engineer at a company with an online booking product (React front end and Node API). I maintain about 180 Playwright tests that run on staging for every merge.

In September a release broke the booking confirmation step in production only. A feature flag was on in prod and off in staging. Management asked for tests in production, so ops set up recorded browser journeys in Dotcom Monitor for login, search and booking, running every 10 minutes against the live site with a test account.

Now we disagree about who owns them. Ops says they’re tests, so QA should update them when the UI changes but I see them as monitoring and I already maintain the same flows in Playwright. Twice this month a UI change broke the booking journey and it alert someone at night for nothing.

For anyone with both an E2E suite and production monitoring

• Who actually updates the production journeys when the UI changes?

• Do you keep the two separate or run part of your E2E suite against production on a schedule instead?

• How do you keep test bookings out of real reporting?

My team recently ran a load test for our company’s website that produced errors we haven’t been able to recreate during normal functional testing. I want to create a practical troubleshooting process to help determine if the problem is with the application, infrastructure, database, or a downstream dependency. Where would you recommend starting with this, and are there any tools you’d recommend?

Context: We appreciate your insight! We have decided to carry out some automated test with combined effort, Jest and Typescript. We will test the video-streaming platform powered by Aws and agreed on the following testcases:

Testcase #1
if the pre-existing user profile got an ID which does not match the current user profile value, (and if the user processes that not-matching id,) a request shall retain the current user profile value, not the non-current profile value

Testcase #2
If a profile is missing in the system, or a profile missing out a valid user link, then the event is carried out and the user record does not invoke any new user profile creation or payment activities.

Testcase #3
If a profile misses out a user id, or test data, or malformed user id, then let the event process then the system carries out no update or delation on the user data -> the user record should go to DLQ or retry queues.

Testcase #4
If the user experiences HTTP 404, 409 or failed network requests, the user will experience the folllowing result: the user record will be marked as partial butch failure, no automated user creation or user link removal provoked.

Testcase #5
A record batch contains successful, missing or malformed records, and that batch has been processed. Only the batch containing malformed record shall go to the retry queue.

Testcase #6
Successful synchronization and profile changes rarely happen then an event has been duplicated (which is to be processed again in the system).
then user sends its profile value then the payment department handles no-change without downstream mutation.

Question: is there any extra testcase where we should test any extra functionality that we missed out in these 6 testcases?

Edit: typo

Ive been with the team for almost 3 years, our team supports the application after changes have been deployed to production.

Our items are usually about upgrades and addressing production related concerns.

we have a 2 week sprint, and once fixed and tested, dev deployed it right away in prod even if it is not yet end of sprint.

That s our usual way, we deployed it right away once fixed and tested.

Would like to ask for your you recommendation when should i perform in sprint regression?

My plan is to perform it on the last 2 days of sprint, even if there are items that were already deployed before it.

I’m the only software tester in the company, and I’ve been given a task that is not big enough that I still have time to upskill even with retests and regression.

However, I feel like I’m doing the bare minimum and I want to achieve something excellent that would convince me that I bring value to the team.

No, I am not pressured by my managers or leads. I am simply being proactive because if I get too comfortable, I will be stagnant.

So far, I have done the required documentation (reqs, TCs, bugs, etc.) and I am still lost on how I should implement the AI agentic testing I’ve been learning.

So as a veteran in the testing world, what would you do if you were in my situation?

I am trying to understand how this plays out in other companies. Take a setup with several teams, each working on a different project and each with its own devs, a QA and a PM. Devs now write code much faster with AI agents, so work reaches QA sooner and in bigger piles. The tickets are often AI-written too, with a lot of noise and some gaps. QA and release are still the last step.

For teams further along, how do you keep QA from falling behind?

Do you still have a QA sign-off? If so, is it per ticket or per release?

How do you keep AI-written tickets and specs useful?

Does each team run its own process, or is there one shared approach?

Thanks.

TLDR; how do I handle an engineer contributing to the e2e codebase without following the architecture?

I have tried everything...

claude.md files, agents.md files, multiple days of PR comments back and forth. No matter what I try, I still am getting pinged for PR's where I can't even make it past the first couple of files before bursting a testicle.

1:1 meetings are no help either, I get the same old "okay, i will fix that," and 20 mins later I have another review on my plate with whatever claude spit out after the call.

I talked to my senior co-workers and they mentioned writing a claude skill to auto-review the diff before the PR is raised. But this is much easier said then done. From my local testing it still lets weak assertions, duplicated methods & locators and complex functionality into the repo when it is not needed.

I have been in QA for ~6 years, I am confident in my ability to lead the automation efforts, but this dude has not raised a PR yet that I could merge without ~2 days of back and forth. I have reverted to allowing these shitty PR's in and fix them myself or else he will complain I am his bottleneck. I have 100,000 other things to deal with and sometimes I can't handle another god knows how many hours of back and forth.

Am I just geriatric in the sense that I care about the maintainability of the tests??

All my experience in tech during the pre-AI days had ingrained some fundamentals of test automation into my head and I may be foolish to try to bring them into this project. I am the only QA, the engineer that is contributing splits his time between other teams so when he is my problem I don't have anywhere else to shuffle it off to.

All this to say, how would you handle writing this PR skill? Just start with the basics and iterate as time goes on? From my understanding of skills, the smaller and more concise the skill = the better it performs deterministically. The use case of this skill is just so damn subjective I am struggling with capturing every potential future comment.

Thanks in advance.

I have been working on an open-source project called Flaky Finder, and the experience has made me question something I initially took for granted: how confidently can we explain why a test failed?

The idea was to build a tool that analyses CI logs and identifies flaky test failures. But while reviewing real logs from different open-source projects, I realised that identifying a failure is much easier than understanding its cause.

A test fails and passes on rerun. Does that automatically make it an environment issue? No. An assertion fails. Does that mean the application has a regression? Not necessarily. Sometimes, the test expectation itself could be wrong.

This led me to spend more time reviewing raw logs, defining classification rules, and questioning assumptions before moving ahead with the parser. I also started looking at problems such as duplicate failure sections, nested test output, and diagnostic messages being mistaken for actual failures.

One decision I made was to keep UNVERIFIED as a valid classification. If the available evidence isn't enough to support a conclusion, the tool shouldn't pretend otherwise.

The project is still a work in progress, but it has changed how I approach test failure analysis. I have realised that finding what failed, understanding why it failed, and having enough evidence to explain it are three different challenges.

And sometimes, the most reliable answer is simply: we don't know yet.

I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions. How do you approach classifying test failures when the available evidence doesn't clearly explain the cause.

Small Node billing service, node's built-in test runner. The test job runs CI-style from a fresh clone, no TTY, nobody watching. When it goes red the question is whether someone gets paged or it's a flaky run that waits until morning.

I added a step that only fires when tests fail, using MiniMax Code CLI headless. The prompt says: for each failing test, classify it as a real regression or flaky; use git log -p and git blame to find the commit that introduced a regression; you may re-run individual tests; do not modify any tracked file, do not commit, do not push, do not open PRs; return classification, evidence, suspect commit, and a minimal unified diff you do not apply.

I had a good test case. A refactor commit changed >= to > in the discount tier logic, making every tier boundary exclusive. Two tests broke deterministically (a discount boundary test and an invoice test at exactly the 10% tier). A third, a retry helper asserting 4 jittered backoff attempts finish under 110ms, fails about 1 run in 3.

Ran it 10 times from fresh clones. It never modified a tracked file, never committed, never pushed. It named the refactor commit as the cause of both deterministic failures and attached a patch restoring >=. In two separate runs it labelled the retry test flaky rather than a regression, once by working out that the jittered waits add up to 70 to 140 ms against the 110 ms budget, once by re-running that single test 5 times (4 passed, 1 failed).

Two design choices I'm keeping. The agent step is advisory only; it never changes the job's pass or fail result. The agent returns one JSON object as its last message and my script checks it (required keys, allowed classification values). The last three runs took 48 to 97 seconds each.

For anyone running agents in CI contexts, how much are you actually letting them do unsupervised?

I’m Egyptian software tester with 4 yoe, only manual, database, api with postman or ci cd with github actions. What should i do to protect myself from being outdated or being replaced with ai?

I've been working as a manual software tester for five years, so I have experience in test planning, but I don't have a programming background.

My goal is to use AI to help me write automated tests, while being able to review, understand, and correct the generated code myself.

What knowledge do I need to achieve this, and approximately how many hours of learning would it take?

hi all, I built a production-ready CI/CD + GitOps pipeline with automated testing. The app is not running as i only provision it on demand for cost reasons.

what it involves:

• Unit Tests (Front-end & Back-end)

• Integration Tests Front-end & Back-end)

• Contract Testing to keep API dependencies safe

• Playwright E2E Testing running in isolated ephemeral environments

its pretty large project but similar to setup in places i have worked.

https://github.com/ianoflynnautomation/bjjeire-tests
https://github.com/ianoflynnautomation/bjjeire
https://github.com/ianoflynnautomation/bjjeire-gitops
https://github.com/ianoflynnautomation/bjjeire-terraform-azurerm-aks

Hey fam, my company has given me some time to build any tool or skill which would aid us in qa/testing/automation. Have any of you guys done anything similar? Can really use some help on ideas and guidance 🙏🏻

The code looked up an organization like this:

admin.from('organizations').select('is_active').eq('id', orgId)

The key of that table is organization_id. So every upload failed its check.

The test for it was green, because it asserted on a mock recorder:

expect(recorder).toContainEqual({

table: 'organizations', op: 'eq', args: ['id', ORG],

})

That 'id' was copied from the code under test. tsc passed too, the query builder accepts any string for a column it doesn't know.

I added two checks at commit time in my coding agent setup. Column names in queries and in those mock assertions get compared with the real schema from the local database. And a function that gains a new query needs one test with no database mock, run against the local stack, with an allowed case and a denied case.

I recently got into a discussion where some developers pitched me their setup of not having any unit tests, just integration tests. Apparently they are working at a SaaS company who does so since pre 2020.

While I was a bit curious about if this could work, they underlined that unit tests have such a tendency to complex mock setups while at the same time not really testing anything "real". Therefore they see no benefit in having them.

I am wondering what is your take on this? Could an integration-test-only setup work, and if so: why and why not?

A keyword list from ChatGPT comes from general knowledge and says nothing about how many postings it rests on. A plausible suggestion is not the same as a common one.

A product manager could be told to add Productboard. None of 421 postings names it but roadmap appears in 85.5%. A software engineer could be told to add Angular, Vue or Swift. They appear in 2.9%, 3.2% and 2.3% of 1,360 postings while scalability is at 52.9% and Python at 44.8%. A marketer could be told to add LinkedIn Ads or Meta Ads. They appear in 0.3% and 0.6% of 347 postings, while go-to-market is at 53.0%.

ChatGPT is the better tool for rewriting a bullet. The counts for seven roles (3,518 postings) and the method are on https://resumefitting.com matching is by term, so a missed synonym counts as absent.

Hey there,

I know it would be better to ask Ranorex licensing questions directly in the Rx forum, but that thing seems to be rather dead and also I have trouble with writing a post there ... aaanyways, maybe someone here has experience with this:

We have a bunch of perpetual floating licenses and we run a local licensing manager on a server. That all works well, but both the Rx clients and the licensing manager are in serious need of an update. Clients are on 10.7.x, licensing manager on 10.3.x - latest version is 12.x

Info on the Rx licensing pages says that perpetual licenses will work with 12.x, but when I install the latest version it tells me that it doesn't find a valid license on the license server.

I assume that I need to update the license manager first - but we are running a bit of a fragile ecosystem here with some externals using our licenses and supporting some important software that may not be impacted, so I would like to have some answers first before I mess up everything.

Am I right that the latest client doesn't find a license because of the outdated license manager?

Will older clients (10.7.x) work with the latest license manager (12.x)? Or do we have to update everything at once?

When updating the license manager, will there be any issues with the existing licenses? Do I have to import them again or will they be available instantly?

Thanks in advance!

I have 7 years of manual QA experience and every job ad i look at now says automation, and lately "AI" or "agentic testing" too. My company just cut half the QA team and i can see where this is heading.

The standard advice is learn python or typescript, then selenium or playwright, then a framework. i've started that path twice and stalled both times around month 2. it's not that i can't code, it's that i was learning to be a junior developer instead of getting better at testing.

What i'm wondering is whether agentic testing changes the route because of some tools i've found such as testRigor, mabl, and Askui to name a few, where you write the test case in plain language as steps with an expected result, and an agent runs it, desktop apps included.

my worry is if the tool does the automating, is "writes a good test case and judges the result properly" actually a career, or is that exactly the part being automated away?

to anyone who moved from manual to automation recently: did you learn to code properly, or go the agentic or low code route, and which one actually got you hired?

Spent a fair bit of time looking at a slow startup issue last week. 2 other people saw the issue on their PCs. One of them even built from source and encountered a first time startup delay of about a minute. If you install it always take 1 minute, and after that its fast again. Its not even an installer issue because the install merely unzips a folder. So today i decide to debug. After the first run, its literally 1 second, so clearly I wanted to work out why.

I broke out wireshark and the file monitor and the bug just hides, I reboot, I rebuild, still launches in 1 second flat. What do you guys do when a bug that always reproduced just vanishes... cry?

Commiserate, im not expecting pointers just cry with me a moment.