Software testing regression testing tutorials and videos

Splitting Regression Tests on an E-commerce Backend

Software Testing Magazine — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 14:45:35 +0000

In this article, Mikhail Golikov, the sole QA on a seven-team backend e-commerce platform, explains where each regression check belongs, in the browser or at the API. He shares the rule he actually uses, two bugs that only one layer could have caught, and the realization that finally made his browser suite small and stable. Author: Mikhail Golikov You cannot test an e-commerce backend entirely through the browser. It is too slow, and at any real scale it is too flaky to trust. You also cannot test it entirely at the API, because then you never exercise the thing the customer actually does, which is assemble an order in a real page and pay for it. So every regression check lands on the same question: does this one belong in the browser or at the API? I ask that question a lot. I am the only tester on a seven-team backend e-commerce platform, with a Selenium suite on one side and an API suite on the other. Getting the answer wrong is expensive in both directions. Put a business rule in the browser and you get a slow, flaky test that fails for reasons that have nothing to do with the rule. Put a user-journey check at the API and you can ship a bug straight to a customer while every test stays green. After a few years of being the person who owns that line, I stopped guessing and settled on a rule. The rule I actually use Test [...]

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Regression Testing in High-Frequency Update Environments

Software Testing Magazine — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 14:23:53 +0000

Software updates in the modern world need to happen as rapidly and as often as possible. The pace of the digital world is relentless and unforgiving to any platform that can’t keep up. Simply put, sites and platforms that don’t update often can’t survive. There are just too many variables to keep up with. Whether it’s just technical upgrades necessary to keep the platform running smoothly, or updates being made based on other considerations like analytics insights, updates cannot be ignored. Whether it’s a mobile app, an online gaming platform, or just a content site, updates, whether critical, cosmetic, or business related, all play their part. Depending on the type of platform, updates may be necessary weekly, or even daily in some cases. Each change carries the risk of existing features suddenly veering off. That’s where high-frequency regression testing comes in and why it’s so critical. Why Rapid Cycles Demand Strong Testing Regression testing is a process that acts like a guardrail against existing features being thrown off whenever large updates are necessary. Without it, developers would face an uphill task trying to perform major upgrades. It basically works by resting old functions as the new ones are added. However, in modern systems, automated regression testing has become the only way to keep up with this rhythm. It offers speed, but more importantly, consistency that manual testing cannot match. Depending on the type of platform, there are unique variations that must be considered. Data intensive platforms like streaming sites and [...]

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Testing In Production

Software Testing Magazine — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 17:07:26 +0000

Testing in production is the only way to know that your software is working right now in production. It not only increases developer confidence in the code but also development velocity because you will spend less time fixing bugs and more time building new products. Testing in production provides an increased accuracy of test results, faster test execution time due to elimination of bad data, and you will have higher confidence before releases because you already know that your features will work before you launch. This presentation discusses the way to run tests in the production environment of a system, how to do it without disrupting real end users, and how to exclude testing data from data and analytics. It will also present the tools that help in this process, the benefits of testing in production, why the pros outweigh the cons, and why it is more reliable. Video producer: http://oredev.org/

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Top 5 Regression Testing Tools in 2019

Software Testing Magazine — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 14:12:49 +0000

It is difficult to maintain and evolve software systems and applications without some automated testing tools that help you to make sure the changes are not breaking the existing features. This article presents you the best regression testing tools available in 2019. Author: Stella Murugesan, Indium Software Regression testing is re-testing of a complete or may be the partial set of already available code to ensure that the code is working fine. Regression testing is responsible for checking that the code works fine even after modification. Today automation regression testing tools are used by the test engineers to test the application. The automated regression testing tools help to save time, cost, and efforts associated with the testing. There are so many testing tools available in the market, and it is tough to choose one to conduct the testing process. The test engineers must have to do a lot of research to go with one or two testing tools, and they have to do so for the better testing results. But the other thing is they cannot try thousands of tools one by one. So today we are here with some of the best tools for regression testing to let you help while selecting one. Let us have a look at them and figure out which tool is suitable for your application. 1. Sahi Pro It is considered a corporate-ready testing tool. Sahi Pro can help you to test web applications, mobile applications, Java applications, and desktop applications. In the case [...]

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Testing Less Without Sacrificing Quality

Software Testing Magazine — Tue, 20 Dec 2016 16:09:38 +0000

When a new release is available, regression testing plays an important role in checking that changes do not negatively impact other parts of the software. The length of these tests might however conflict with the goal of having shorter release cycle. In their article, Kim Herzig, Michaela Greiler, Jacek Czerwonka and Brendan Murphy present a strategy that accelerates test processes without sacrificing product quality. Software testing is viewed as a key activity to verify the quality of code. Working for Microsoft, Kim Herzig, Michaela Greiler, Jacek Czerwonka and Brendan Murphy had to find a way to improve the testing process for large Microsoft codebases like Windows, Office, and Dynamics. To achieve this goal, they developed a cost based test selection strategy called THEO. This is a dynamic, self-adaptive test selection strategy that does not sacrifice software quality. THEO automatically skips test executions when the expected cost of running a test exceeds the expected cost of not running it. THEO is designed such that all tests will execute on all code changes at least once before the software release. Executing all tests at least once ensures that all bugs will be found. This way, software quality is not decreased, but the strategy might delay defect detection to later development phases. The underlying cost model is based on historic test measurements to estimate future test execution costs and causes no runtime overhead. This model was evaluated by simulating historic development processes for three major Microsoft products: Windows, Office and Dynamics. These simulations [...]

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API Testing Definition

Software Testing Magazine — Mon, 17 Oct 2016 15:43:49 +0000

API like web services are the foundation of modern approaches for software architecture in modern software development. In this article, Alexey Grinevich presents the main challenges when testing different API technologies during regression testing. He also discusses which features a tool should provide to perform API testing. Author: Alexey Grinevich, Inflectra Corporation, http://www.inflectra.com/ The move to cloud computing has highlighted the importance of Application Programming Interfaces (API). With the rise in cloud applications and interconnect platforms, API testing is a necessity. What is an API? Modern computer systems are generally designed using the ‘layered architecture approach’: This means that the core functionality of the system is contained within the “business logic” layer as a series of discrete but connected business components. They are responsible for taking information from the various user interfaces (UIs), performing calculations and transactions on the database layer and then presenting the results back to the user interface. However, in addition to communicating with human beings via the UI layer, computers systems have to be able to communicate directly with each other. For example, your mobile ride sharing application will need to communicate with the mapping service, the traffic and weather services and other specialized applications used by the drivers providing the rides. In this modern and interconnected world, we take for granted that all these different systems can speak to each other seamlessly, but in reality that would not be possible without APIs. API Definition At its core, an Application Programming Interface (API) is a formal [...]

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Regression Testing with Diffy

Software Testing Magazine — Thu, 21 Apr 2016 18:22:57 +0000

Your team has just finished a major refactor of a service and all your unit and integration tests pass. Nice work! But you are not done just yet. Now you need to make extra sure that you didn’t break anything and that there are not any lurking bugs that you have not caught yet. It’s time to put Diffy to work. Diffy is an open source tool developed by Twitter to find potential bugs in software services. Unlike tools that ensure that your code is sound, like unit or integration tests, Diffy compares the behavior of your modified service by standing up instances of your new service and your old service side by side, routing example requests to each, comparing the responses and provides back any regressions that have surfaced from those comparisons. Video producer: https://developers.google.com/google-test-automation-conference/

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Testing in Production at Netflix

Software Testing Magazine — Thu, 09 Apr 2015 14:51:56 +0000

Every day, Netflix has more customers consuming more content on an increasing number of client devices. We’re also constantly innovating to improve our customers’ experience. Testing in such a rapidly changing environment is a huge challenge, and we’ve concluded that running tests in our production environment can often be the most efficient way to validate those changes. This talk covers three test methods that we use in production: simulating all kinds of outages with the Simian Army, looking for regressions using canaries, and measuring test effectiveness with code coverage analysis from production.

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