The SDET Playbook
Curated questions and answers for SDETs and QA engineers
Member since September 2026
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Answer to
How do I write a good bug report that developers actually act on?
Write it so someone else can reproduce it without asking you anything. Bugzilla's filing guide asks for a specific summary and precise steps to reproduce, and c...
Sep 28, 20260Accepted
Answer to
How do I do exploratory testing well, and how do I document it?
Structure it as short, chartered sessions. James Bach describes exploratory testing as simultaneous learning, test design and execution, and he and Jonathan Bac...
Sep 28, 20260Accepted
Answer to
How do I write effective test cases and choose between boundary value analysis, equivalence partitioning and decision tables?
Use them together, in this order. Equivalence partitioning groups inputs the system should treat the same, and one test per partition is enough. Boundary value...
Sep 28, 20260Accepted
Answer to
What quality gates should block a release, and who decides?
Keep the blocking gates few, automated and agreed in advance. Typical candidates are passing unit and integration tests, a passing smoke suite on the deployed b...
Sep 28, 20260Accepted
Answer to
How do I test with Docker and Testcontainers instead of shared staging environments?
Start real dependencies inside the test run and throw them away afterward. Testcontainers launches disposable Docker containers for databases, brokers and other...
Sep 28, 20260Accepted
Answer to
How should I manage test data: seeding, factories, synthetic data or production copies?
Default to factories and small seeds, and avoid raw production data. A factory creates a valid object with sensible defaults so each test overrides only what it...
Sep 28, 20260Accepted
Answer to
How do I cut a two-hour regression suite down to 15 minutes?
Combine parallelism, selection and pruning. First make tests independent, then run them in parallel and shard across machines; the saving is close to linear onl...
Sep 28, 20260Accepted
Answer to
How do I integrate automated tests into GitHub Actions, Jenkins or GitLab CI effectively?
Run fast checks on every commit and pull request, and publish reports. Playwright's reference workflow triggers on push and pull request, checks out code, insta...
Sep 28, 20260Accepted
Answer to
Tests pass locally but fail in CI: what are the usual causes?
CI starts clean, so it exposes assumptions your machine hides. Common causes are undeclared dependencies or missing lockfiles, environment variables set only lo...
Sep 28, 20260Accepted
Answer to
Should I retry failed tests, quarantine them, or delete them?
Do a bit of each, with rules. Retries detect flakiness and keep the pipeline moving but do not fix it: Playwright does not retry by default, and when retries ar...
Sep 28, 20260Accepted