Software Testing Videos and Tutorials: Load Testing, Unit Testing, Functional Testing, Performance Testing, Agile Testing, DevOps

Better Test Scripts: Untangling Your Spaghetti Test Code

Software Testing Magazine — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:17:12 +0000

Test automation engineers often take not enough care of the test scripts. In many of software testing teams we work in, test code is treated much less carefully than production code. It is expected that the test scripts just work. Mindless copy and paste of setup code from one test case to another is seldom seen as problematic, duplications are widely accepted, and things are named randomly. Managing spaghetti test code always leads to problems: gaps in assertions become pretty non-obvious consolidating long-running test suites becomes a cumbersome task magic numbers need to be changed all across the suite, when they become outdated Problems like these (“tangles”) affect the overall maintainability of our overall code base. Over the years the presenter has identified several good practices (“untangles”) to prevent these problems with test automation and keep test code maintainable. Some are borrowed from general good code quality standards, some are specific for test code. This presentation briefly discusses the properties of good test code. He presents a bunch of good practices and shows them applied to an example (in Java). In the end, you should be able to identify tangled code and apply the techniques to untangle your test scripts. Video producer: https://oredev.org/

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Industrial Strength Software Testing for Complex Systems

Software Testing Magazine — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:21:01 +0000

Complexity is a property of software systems with lots of components that interact in lots of ways. Bugs thrive in complexity. Inert bugs in one component may be activated by seemingly unrelated changes in another. Latent bugs may take years to be observed or detected by software testing. Just writing lots of unit tests for this kind of software isn’t enough. Bad tests slow you down without catching meaningful bugs. Good tests are hard-working productivity multipliers. This presentation explores a variety of software testing techniques that have been applied to a commercial database engine over a decade of active development, including model-based testing, fuzzing, and more. Borrowing testing methodologies from other industries, you will see how testing complex software requires challenging the ideas of what a test is, and how testing fits into software development. Video producer: https://ndcsydney.com/

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Story Maps and Behavior-Driven Development (BDD)

Software Testing Magazine — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 17:36:13 +0000

This is a hands-on practical session about agile testing where participants split into groups and learn how to do story mapping and how to write Given-When-Then Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) tests. This workshop by Jon Kern covers the use of Story Mapping and BDD-style techniques to break down feature requests for Agile Testing. Behavior-Driven Development is an Agile software methodology that enhances collaboration between developers, testers, and business stakeholders. It is used to define system behavior through concrete, plain-language examples (Given-When-Then). It bridges communication gaps by focusing on user-centric functionality and business outcomes, reducing waste and producing automated, “living” documentation. Story mapping is an Agile technique that visualizes a user’s journey through a product by arranging user stories on a two-dimensional map. It organizes tasks chronologically (horizontal axis) to show the workflow, while prioritizing, detailing, or grouping functionalities (vertical axis) for release planning. This collaborative, user-centric approach provides a holistic view of the product, fostering a shared understanding and preventing feature-driven, disjointed development. These two videos emphasize the importance of collaboration between Business, Dev, QA, UX, by lowering organizational boundaries, silos, and spheres of traditional organizational influence, command & control. The presenter explains how BDD starts, as a means of expressing requirements (defining what “done” looks like) and feeds into the actual development life cycle. Jon Kern explains why he insists that teams should use BDD and TDD with test automation. Video producer: https://agile-serbia.rs/

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Best Practice for Property-Based Testing

Software Testing Magazine — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 17:03:05 +0000

This talk aims to introduce property-based testing, why you may want to use it, and real-life use cases for including it in code bases. Property-based testing is an approach to testing that involves specifying statements that should always be true (for example, reversing a list twice will give the original result) rather than relying on specific examples. This presentation provides an introduction to property-based testing, why you would want to use it, and how you might apply it in the real world. How do you unit test a function? Typically, one might identify different sets of inputs (for example, for an integer you may have sets for positive, negative, and zero) and write a single unit test using a single example from each set. Can you be sure your code is correct for the whole set? Maybe it only works for that particular example? Here are the steps used to perform property-based testing: Identify properties (invariants) Think about rules that should always hold true for your function or system. Example: For a sorting function, the output should always be in non-decreasing order. Choose a property-based testing framework Popular tools: Hypothesis (Python) QuickCheck (Haskell, Erlang, Elixir) ScalaCheck (Scala) jqwik (Java) Write property tests instead of example tests Instead of writing assert sort([3,1,2]) == [1,2,3], you write: “For any list of integers, sorting it should produce a list where each element is ≤ the next.” Let the framework generate inputs The tool automatically produces random inputs (including edge cases like empty lists, [...]

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The Testing Pyramid in the Age of AI: From Unit, Integration to API Testing

Software Testing Magazine — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 15:45:30 +0000

In an era where artificial intelligence (AI) writes code, reviews pull requests, and even generates tests, how does the standard Testing Pyramid still hold up? Has it quietly crumbled under more modern demands? This presentation reexamines the iconic testing models — the Testing Pyramid, Trophy, and Honeycomb — not as golden rules, but as artifacts of a software testing world that existed before AI. The presenter explains why these traditional software testing models often fail in practice. She discusses how they clash with today’s rapid software development cycles and what a modern testing hierarchy could look like when AI joins the team. As the maintainer of an open-source testing project, the presentation shares real-world insights into how software developers today are approaching unit tests, API integration tests, and the growing role of AI in automating, optimizing, and sometimes even breaking those workflows. The talk explores where AI shines (and where it doesn’t), the gap between hype and reality, and how teams can evolve their test automation strategy for this new testing paradigm. Video producer: https://www.apidays.global/

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Lessons Learned From Code Review Remarks

Software Testing Magazine — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 20:05:33 +0000

It appears that one consequence of being a tech lead is that team members consider you the default reviewer for all their pull requests (PR). Though the code review process seems straightforward, there are many aspects that need to be considered. Effectively being one form of feedback, I would like to share my observations and give advice to future leaders about making this process as smooth as possible. Code review is an essential technique to improve the code quality and share knowledge. It helps developers grow, opens space for constructive criticism and discussions. This presentation shares general guidance about how to approach reviewing PRs based on size and complexity. Then, the main focus is about the soft skills related to code revies, targeting the following questions: Do I need to tailor review per team member? How will the written feedback be interpreted? How detailed should feedback be? What actions to take if you want to decrease the amount of remarks in a PR? Many of these situations are based on personal experience from making code review for more than 8 years. Video producer: https://www.devoxx.com/ Further readings Google guide: How to do a code review How to review code effectively: A GitHub staff engineer’s philosophy Code Review: Why It Matters

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Untangling Your Spaghetti Test Automation Code

Software Testing Magazine — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 14:42:06 +0000

In a lot of software development teams, test automation code is treated much less carefully than production code. It is expected to just work. Mindless copy and paste of setup code from one test case to another is seldom seen as problematic, scripts duplications are widely accepted, and things are named randomly. This always leads to problems: gaps in assertions become pretty non-obvious; consolidating long-running test suites becomes a cumbersome task; magic numbers need to be changed all across the suite, when they become outdated. Problems like these (“tangles”) affect the overall maintainability of our overall test automation code base. Over the years, the presenter has identified several good practices (“untangles”) to prevent these problems and keep test automation code maintainable. Some borrowed from general good code quality standards, some specific for test code. This presentation briefly discusses the properties of good test code. It presents a bunch of good practices and shows them applied to an example (in Java). In the end, you should be able to identify tangled test automation code and apply the techniques to untangle it. Video producer: https://oredev.org/

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Accessibility Testing at Scale Powered by Appium

Software Testing Magazine — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 17:05:57 +0000

To date, web applications have been the focus of digital accessibility tooling. Attention is now pivoting to mobile apps that are usually tested with Appium. So how do we test mobile apps for accessibility? Many organizations test their apps with assistive technologies. This is a manual effort, takes a lot of time and is often limited by physical device availability. A far better approach is to leverage automated accessibility testing on cloud-hosted devices. It is effective in the detection of issues across a wide spectrum of your end user communities. Video producer: https://appiumconf.com/

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