Hello there! 👋

Welcome to the 205th edition of Software Testing Notes, a weekly newsletter featuring must-read content on Software Testing. I hope this week has been good for you so far.

This week, we will explore:

• Measuring QA Success: Beyond Test Counts and Bug Reports

• Validating JSON API Responses in k6

• Using the browser console for accessibility testing

• Clean API tests with cypress aliases

• How We Made Our E2E Tests 12x Faster

and more…

✨ Featured

The 2026 State of AI in Software Testing

Learn how AI is being used in practice, where teams are seeing real gains, how QA roles are beginning to shift as adoption grows and a lot more.

AI is now part of most QA workflows, but outcomes vary widely. BrowserStack’s 2026 AI in Software Testing report is based on a global survey of more than 250 software testing leaders.

Download the report!

📚 Testing

Quality Insight: Exploratory Testing Life by Judy Mosley

With AI at the centre stage shifting career paths, many of us feel this strange anxiety. Judy Mosley takes a look with the lens of an “Explorer” mindset and shares reflections on solo testing, community conversations, and the messy reality of modern tech work.

When Test Cases Aren’t Enough: Why I Use Stories by Peter Wilson

Peter Wilson explores how storytelling can ground testing in real-world context, especially when working with complex or AI-driven systems where “correct” isn’t always obvious, and even developers can’t predict the outcome.

Why Test, Test What, Then How? by James Thomas

This piece is a thoughtful walk-through by James Thomas on what intentional testing looks like in an AI oriented, distributed system.

Measuring QA Success: Beyond Test Counts and Bug Reports by Joshua Bihun

Joshua Bihun takes a hard look at the way many teams measure QA and makes a compelling case that metrics such as test and automation counts, bug counts often fail to reflect meaningful quality.

🔍 Software Testing

⚙️ Automation

Investigating AI: Playwright-Test-Planner and Playwright-Test-Generator by T.J. Maher

This practical walkthrough by T.J. Maher puts three emerging Playwright AI agents called planner, generator, and healer. The article details how they can outline a test strategy, spin up a TypeScript page-object framework, and even try to patch broken tests using nothing more than a basic scenario.

Clean API tests with cypress aliases by Bart Vanherck

If you’ve ever wrestled with deeply nested .then() chains in Cypress API tests, Bart Vanherck shares a cleaner pattern built around aliases and .as(), showing how to store, reuse, and safely chain request responses.

How We Made Our E2E Tests 12x Faster by Alexandru NEAMTU

Alexandru NEAMTU shows how they improved Playwright test suite execution time from 90 seconds to only 7 seconds by using fast API logins, simplifying checks, and removing extra setup work.

Why Your Playwright Tests Are Still Flaky (And It’s Not Because of Timing) by Sourojit Das

As Playwright is all around this days, Sourojit Das challenges the common belief that switching to Playwright automatically eliminates flaky tests. he explains why instability persists even with auto-waiting and shows that the real causes often lie in system architecture, not the test framework.

When Your AI Deletes the Database: Why Testing LLM Applications Requires a Different Playbook

This article provides a walks through of a practical, layered approach to testing nondeterministic AI systems using semantic evaluation, small but meaningful test suites, and tight feedback loops.

🔍 Test Automation

💨 Performance

Validating JSON API Responses in k6

If you’re using k6 for load testing and mostly watching response times, this article walks through a comprehensive set of JSON validations you can add to your tests.

🔍 Performance Testing

🌞 Accessibility

Using the browser console for accessibility testing

Take a look at this practical introduction to using the browser console as a lightweight accessibility test tool, showing how a few small JavaScript snippets can instantly surface headings, landmarks, labels, focus order, and more issues.

🔍 Accessibility Testing

🛠️ Resources & Tools

Animate SQL — Visualize SQL queries online.

CSV SQL Tool — Run SQL queries on CSV files directly in your browser. No data leaves your browser. Fast, private, and easy to use.

📝 List of Software Testers

Do you create content around Software Testing ? Submit yours blog details here and I will add it to the list.

🎁 Bonus Content

📌 OTHER INTERESTING STUFF

• Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

• Closing the Software Loop

• Software Performance Engineering: The Ideas I Keep Coming Back To

⭐ LAST WEEK’S MOST READ

1. Playwright MCP Is Killing Traditional Test Automation, Here’s How SDETs Must Adapt in 2026 by Pramod Dutta

2. Let’s get Playwright with a few tests set up quickly by Melissa Fisher

3. Forget coverage; focus on risk by Stuart Thomas

😂 And Finally,

When you are asked to test in Prod 🤣

📨 Send Me Your Articles, Tutorials, Tools!

Wrote something? Send links via Direct Message on Twitter @thetestingkit (details here). If you have any suggestions for improvement or corrections, feel free to reply to this email.

Thanks to everyone for subscribing and reading!

Happy Testing!
Pritesh(@priteshusdadiya)