QA — Quality Assurance
Guides, checklists and case studies for testers. No fluff — concrete steps and links.
Topics
Pick your angle. Click to jump straight in.
Mobile & Game QA
iOS, Android, IAP, real hardware
7 articlesChecklists
Templates ready for regression
4 articlesAutomation
Selenium, Playwright, flaky tests
16 articlesCareer & growth
Soft skills, learning, AI tools
17 articlesBug case studies
Real incidents and lessons learned
1 articleNon-functional
Performance, security, load
6 articlesRecommended reads
Three articles worth reading for both newcomers and veterans.
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adb for mobile QA: 40 commands that save hours
ADB (Android Debug Bridge) is the main tool for mobile QA on Android. A list of commands that are actually used during regression and bug triage.
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Classical QA is dying. What replaces it
The classical QA approach was built on a simple idea — if we test thoroughly before release, we can trust the system after release. Today that no longer works. Here's what needs to change.
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5 books every tester should read
QA as a profession has classic literature — every senior engineer knows it. If you haven't read them, time to fix the gap. 5 books that shaped the modern approach to testing.
Latest
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Rate limiting — how to test the limits everyone remembers only after an incident
While nobody is hammering the API, limits seem unnecessary — their absence is invisible right up until the first incident. A first-person take: the limit as a two-sided contract (the server restricts — the client survives it), the N/N+1 boundary and an honest 429 with Retry-After, key scope and how an account-based limit lets attackers DoS a victim, the burst at window boundaries, bypasses via X-Forwarded-For and sibling endpoints, the zones where a limit is mandatory (OTP, reset, promo codes), and why 'limits are off on staging' equals an untested production.
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A QA's first 30 days on a new project — how to ramp up without doing anything dumb
Day one: unfamiliar product, confusing environments, and someone's already asking you to 'take a quick look at this feature.' A first-person take: fresh eyes as a resource with an expiration date, a week spent as a user, a risk map built from three questions to the team ('what breaks most often? what was the last incident? where are you afraid to touch?'), exemplary first bug reports, why criticizing processes in week two is the worst move, small finished improvements by the end of the month, and a 30-day checklist.
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Autotests that aren't in CI are a hobby: wiring tests into the pipeline without drowning
400 autotests that run "sometimes, locally" are not automation. A first-person take: run layers (a PR gate budgeted in minutes / post-merge / nightly), sharding and why parallelism kills dependent tests, a retry policy that doesn't mask flakiness (passed-on-retry = yellow, not green), quarantine with exactly two exits, the red-main rule, failure artifacts (a trace instead of re-debugging), and suite health metrics.
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Registration & login testing checklist — with a Playwright autotest for every item
Login is the first screen a user sees and a favorite spot for production incidents. The "checklist item → how to automate it" format: user enumeration via identical error messages, password reset with a single-use token, logout and the back button, HttpOnly/Secure cookies via context.cookies(), sessions across two tabs, mocking 429 for lockout UI, the storageState pattern so you don't log in inside every test — and what parts of auth should never go into e2e.
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Update testing — the bugs only users on old versions ever see
The release was tested perfectly — on a clean install. But almost every user gets it as an update on top of an old version with old data. A first-person take: why an update means new code reading old data, the N-5 → N version matrix and migration chains, updates landing mid-session, force update and its bypasses, staged rollout and a server that must support two versions at once, downgrade as a crash loop, first launch after an update ≠ FTUE — and why an archive of old builds must exist.
Resource archive
A curated collection of 600+ links to articles, videos and materials on testing — gathered from our Telegram channel over 5+ years.
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