Recently the company I am working at was running into performance issues which became a pain to sort out as it was so sporadic (lasted like 5 mins max every time), but when it happened it affected the entire company.

Today I wanted to take a step back and cover something I should have written about ages ago: getting started with Pester from the very beginning.

Pester 6.0.0 was released on July 7, roughly two years after the first 6.0 alpha. If you followed my getting started with Pester post last year, everything you wrote then still runs — but there’s a new way of writing assertions, a few behavior changes that can bite, and some genuinely useful additions.

I was a guest on the July 13th episode of The PowerShell Podcast with Andrew Pla.
The episode, Write the Test First – Robert Prüst on Pester, PSConf, and Learning in Public, is now available!

Five weeks after Pester 6.0, Pester 6.1.0 was released on August 11. It’s a point release in name, but it fills the obvious gap in the new assertions: writing your own Should-* assertions that behave like the built-in ones.

The recordings of PSConfEU 2026 are online, and that includes both of my sessions: an advanced Pester workshop together with Jakub Jareš, and a session on building better PowerShell code with GitHub’s Spec Kit.

Pester 6.2.0 was released on September 9 — the third feature release in the Pester 6 line in just over two months. The headline is setup files that apply per folder, but a few of the smaller changes might matter more to you day to day, including one that reverses a 6.0 breaking change.