IT systems testing *

Regular expressions (also called regexp, or regex) are a mechanism for finding and replacing text. In a string, a file, multiple files... They are used by developers in application code, testers in autotests, and even just when working on the command line!

Why is this better than a simple search? Because it allows you to specify a pattern.

For example, you receive a date of birth in the DD.MM.YYYYY format. You need to pass it on, but in the YYYY-MM-DD format. How can you do this with a simple search? You don't know in advance what the exact date will be.

Сервис по генерации музыки Sferoom AI - эдакий прототип и двойник Suno. Испытав его, я остаюсь при своём - выбираю Suno.

Тут не выведение на чистую воду и не обличение, а исследование того, насколько удобно Suno вмонтирован в Sferoom

Почему я сравниваю именно эти две подписки? Потому что под капотом у Sferoom всё тот же знакомый нелицензионный движок Suno v4.5+, предоставляемый через посредство kie.ai - нелицензионного поставщика API Suno.

В феврале 2026 выбранный мной дистрибьютор песен и музыки Sferoom добавил на свой сайт возможность генерировать свои треки с помощью встроенного ИИ. То есть сейчас на одном русскоязычном Интернет-сайте можно и сделать песню, и подготовить публикацию на стриминги, и собрать статистику прослушиваний.

Мог ли я проигнорировать этот факт? Конечно, нет.

Должен ли я докопаться до самой сути? Конечно, да!

В статье разбираем функции ИИ-генератора песен и музыки Sferoom AI и считаем плюсы и минусы.

My name is Anatoly Bobunov, and I work as a Software Development Engineer in Test - or SDET for short - at EXANTE. When I joined one of our projects, I discovered that several of our test suites took more than an hour to run - painfully slow, to the point where running them for every merge request was simply unrealistic. We wanted fast feedback on each commit, but at that speed, it just wasn’t going to happen.

Eventually, through a series of small but precise improvements, I managed to speed things up to 8.5× faster, without rewriting the tests from scratch. In this article, I’ll walk through the bottlenecks we found and how we fixed them.

From outsourcing to product: a QA engineer’s honest journey to better releases, healthier work culture & real impact on the product.

During load testing of Tantor Postgres databases or other PostgreSQL-based databases using the standard tool pgbench, specialists often encounter non-representative results and the need for repeated tests due to the fact that details of the environment (such as DBMS configuration, server characteristics, PostgreSQL versions) are not recorded. In this article we are going to review author's pg_perfbench, which is designed to address this issue. It ensures that scenarios are repeatable, prevents the loss of important data, and streamlines result comparison by registering all parameters in a single template. It also automatically launches pgbench with TPC-B load generation, collects all metadata on the testing environment, and generates a structured report.

We all strive to build better software, and to do it faster. I believe Test-driven Development offers us a path towards this goal. Still struggling to efficiently utilize this approach? Then I invite you to discuss my tips and tricks to unlock the benefits of TDD!

This article explores the concept of equivalence classes from the perspective of mathematical analysis and their application in QA testing. The author explains how properly defining equivalence classes helps optimize test design, reducing the number of test cases while maintaining thorough verification.

Using the example of currency conversion from rubles to euros, the article demonstrates how to construct equivalence classes, verify their compliance with mathematical properties (reflexivity, symmetry, transitivity), and identify errors in data partitioning.

This article is useful for QA engineers, developers, and analysts who want to gain a deeper understanding of logical testing principles and improve the efficiency of their test strategies.

We are a brokerage platform operating in a dynamic and complex domain. This specificity comes with a set of challenges. On the one hand, it entails a high variability of scenarios and potentially significant risks associated with errors. On the other hand, it has short development iterations with frequent delivery cycles. 

In this article, we will share how we maintain the quality of our numerous backend services, which provide essential information to our trading terminals.

A story about evolving our CI process for a monolithic Python repo with tests, challenges faced, and solutions. Discussing Docker, linters, Allure TestOps, and more.

Hi, I’m Nastya, the Product Owner of EXANTE’s desktop and web trading terminals. I began working at the company nearly five years ago as a Junior QA Engineer. Since then, I’ve advanced to QA Lead and ultimately to Product Owner. In this article, I’d like to share my growth journey within the company and the steps that helped me progress. I hope that my story will be helpful to those seeking to advance their careers but are unsure where to start.

In today's fast-paced world of software development, integrating third-party APIs and services is a common practice. These integrations can enhance functionality, improve user experience, and provide additional features that would be time-consuming and costly to develop in-house. However, ensuring these integrations work seamlessly with your software is crucial, and this is where the importance of a test environment, or sandbox, comes into play.

A sandbox environment allows developers to test the integration between their software and third-party services without risking the stability and security of the production environment. This controlled setting enables thorough testing, helping to uncover issues before they affect end-users. By covering as many test cases as possible, developers can ensure robust and reliable integrations.

But what if your third-party provider, such as a bank or government e-system, does not offer a sandbox environment? This scenario can pose significant challenges, but there are several strategies you can employ to mitigate these issues.

Hello everyone, my name is Denis, I am Software Developer Engineer in Test (SDET) at Bimeister. I am in charge of test software development - frameworks, automated tests, CI Pipelines configuration, and much more.

In this article, I will tell you how we defeated the Stale Element Reference Exception while developing our framework using Selenium WebDriver and C#.

The common combination of JUnit5, Selenide and Allure has proven to be stable and reliable for autotesting. The remaining issue, however, lies in test length increase up until the rise of overall test numbers. The resulting video files turn out to be over an hour. Alexander Kochergin, Lead engineer at Innotech, has found a way to simplify the process.

The Positive Hack Days 11 forum, which took place May 18–19, 2022, was truly epic. The bitterly fought ATM hacking contest featured no fewer than 49 participants. How cool is that? The winner of this year's prize fund of 50,000 rubles, with the handle Igor, was the first to hack the virtual machines. And he wasn't even at the event! :)

Besides Igor, eight other participants picked up prizes this year for their VM-hacking skills. They were: drd0c, vient, vrazov, durcm, zxcvcxzas7, asg_krd, hundred303, and drink_more_water_dude. A big thank-you to everyone who took part, and for those who weren't at PHDays, here are the links to the virtual machines.

Testing is one of the key processes in development. However, without analysis it is tough to say how effective testers really are. Innotech’s lead tester-engineer Pavel Petrov shared a number of metrics that are being used in project work.

A tester is one of the most stressful roles in IT. You constantly need to be concentrated and report bugs to developers in your team. Lidiya Yegorova, Innotech’s “Scoring conveyor” team QA-Lead shared her practices on how to minimize the stress while testing.

A website with bugs could be a real pain in the neck for business. Just one 404 or 500 error could end up costing an obscene amount of money for the company and hurt a good reputation. But there is a way to avoid this issue: the website testing. That's sort of what this article is about. After reading this article, you will learn how to test code in Django, create your "own website tester" and much more. Welcome to the article.

Test automation, with product built in microservice architecture could be very situational in context of testing goals and ways to achieve them. You got an easy life if you testing a service, that is an isolated entity, which is receiving some data and providing a result of it's work in a response, by callback or through additional endpoint. In this case all you need to do is cover all the endpoints of the service, and probably learn to catch it's callbacks. However, it's not the only case. Sometimes you need to test service which isn't totally isolated, but a part of a chain of interactions. This service could send some data to other services within your infrastructure or even to third parties. This time you got plenty of additional things to bother of:

Nothing and nobody will escape oblivion. Whatever you may say, the history of mankind is a history of automation and the subsequent evolution of workers. This happened both during the first industrial revolution and during the second. The same thing happened with digital revolution. Now machine learning and artificial intelligence are being implemented everywhere. What is the future of software testing?