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

How to run database integration tests 20 times faster helps you to improve the performance of your integration test suite by sacrificing the durability requirement of ACID transactions. If you are running your integration tests against a real database server (i.e. the one you use in production) and you want to make your test suite faster, you should read this blog post.

JUnit 5 – Extension Model identifies the problems of JUnit 4 extension model and describes how JUnit 5 aims to solve these problems by preferring extension points over features. This is the fourth part of Nicolai Parlog’s excellent JUnit 5 tutorial. If you haven’t read the other parts of his tutorial, I recommend that you take a look at them as well.

Robot Framework Tutorial 2016 – Integration with TeamCity CI-Server is the fifth part of Codecentric’s new Robot Framework tutorial and it helps you to integrate Robot Framework with TeamCity CI-Server. I like this blog post because it is a kind of pointless to run automated tests without using a CI server, but I would love to see a tutorial that helps me to integrate Robot Framework with Jenkins. Anyway, if you want to run Robot tests by using the TeamCity CI-Server, this blog post will help you to get started.

Testing improvements in Spring Boot 1.4 describes the testing improvements provided by Spring Boot 1.4. One reason why I like Spring so much is that its testing support is awesome. I know that Java EE has a very good testing support as well (check Arquillian), but for some reason I cannot find any new blog posts about it. That is a shame because I would love to feature them on Java Testing Weekly.

The Really Valuable Stuff

100% Coverage is Possible is a philosophical post that tries to find the meaning of “100% coverage”. Although this post most likely doesn’t give you the answers you seek, it helps to understand that the term coverage is not as clear as you might think. This is valuable because you can always find more information about coverage, and maybe reach a conclusion (and realize that your conclusion is wrong).

Ignorance as a tool to frame better questions (unfortunately this article is not available anymore) explains why ignorance can be a valuable tool if we use it for obtaining information from the system under test. I assume that this blog post talks about exploratory testing, but I think we can use the same technique when we are writing automated tests.

(unfortunately this article is not available anymore) explains why ignorance can be a valuable tool if we use it for obtaining information from the system under test. I assume that this blog post talks about exploratory testing, but I think we can use the same technique when we are writing automated tests. The Danger of the Technocrat Tester is a long rant that describes the problems caused by people who think that test automation and test automation tools can replace old fashioned testing. I suspect that I don’t quite get the problem because it seems unbelievable that a developer would let someone else to write automated tests for his/her code. Maybe it is just me, but if I write code, I will write unit and integration tests for that code. I have also written my share of end-to-end tests, but I think that these could be written by a tester as well. Also, I have never thought that automated tests could replace a tester. Maybe that is why I don’t understand this problem.

The Ultimate Tester: Value Creation describes how an agile tester can create value from day one. I am not going to reveal how a ultimate tester can do this, because I think that you should read the original blog post. However, I suspect that the biggest challenge of a ultimate tester is to ensure that his/her team members do not feel threatened by his/her actions. I think that a ultimate tester would an extremely valuable addition to any team, but sadly (insecure) people can act like children if they feel that someone is threatening their authority in any way.

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.

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