NASA Testing, Playwright Typescript Course, Cypress BDD and More! TGNS130

[00:00:00] Joe Colantonio How did NASA test their critical systems for the successful Apollo missions? Have you seen the new course on how to get started with Playwright and type script, and what really caused the CrowdStrike Microsoft outage last week? Find out in this episode of The Test Guild News Show for the week of July 28th. Grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and let's do this.

[00:00:21] Joe Colantonio Before we get into it if you haven't already, please make sure to subscribe to our Test Guild LinkedIn News Show newsletter that I'll have a link for down below to never miss another episode.

[00:00:31] Joe Colantonio First up, Sai announced on LinkedIn that Appium Device Farm has expanded its capabilities. And he talks about how it allows you to run iOS test on real devices using any non Mac agent using Pi. And this feature simplifies your mobile testing process by allowing you to focus on writing scripts and design frameworks. Appium Device Farm handles all the complex orchestration for you and it's open source, but you might be asking why would you ever set up an in-house device farm? Here are some reasons that Sai gave, it's cost effective for large scale testing. You get enhanced control and security. It's customizable to specific needs instant device access, reliable performance testing, and seamless CI/CD integration. If you're doing anything with mobile testing in Appium, make sure to check out Appium Device Farm in the link down below.

[00:01:24] Joe Colantonio And you want to know how to do AI testing for Salesforce customizations? In this webinar of the week, it goes over how Salesforce offers endless customization possibilities. But how can you keep up with the testing to ensure your customizations actually work? In this webinar, they're going to go over the usage of an AI test engineer that autonomously creates and maintains test scripts, including multi-language support, and this simplifies the creation of tests automation scripts. Best practices for integrating AI testing into Salesforce Development cycles, and insights on how autonomous testing can accelerate your deployment cycles and reduce time. Definitely check it out in link down below and hope to see you there.

[00:02:04] Joe Colantonio All right. In a Follow the Money segment, this company raised $36 million. And this is all how QA Wolf, a company that specializes in software testing automation has successfully raised 36 million in series B funding round. The company announced the opening of a waitlist for its upcoming Android and iOS test automation services. And if you're doing anything with iOS and Android testing, this sounds like a service or tool that you're interested in. You can definitely join the waitlist using that link down below.

[00:02:33] Joe Colantonio Have you ever wondered how you can use Cypress with BDD? If so, I have this next blog article for you. In this article, Pepqy writes all about insights and how to design a testing framework using Cypress with a behavior driven approach. And they set the stage by going over what is BDD? What is Cucumber? What is Gherkin? If you don't know, behavior driven development is supposed to be a collaborative method that enhances software quality by enhancing test cases in plain descriptive language, and this post shows how to set up and configure Cypress which as you know is a popular end-to-end testing tool to leverage BDD. The article also shows that integrating BDD with Cypress when done right can create more readable and maintainable tests. In the article, Pepqy goes over how to set up your environment, how to configure Cypress, how to configure BDD, and how to write your first test using this approach. And by doing this, it also goes for how testers can validate specifications early. Hopefully, reducing bugs and enhancing collaboration between developers, testers and non-technical stakeholders. That's the dream. Does it work? Try it for yourself. Use that link down below.

[00:03:39] Joe Colantonio What's more complicating the sending humans to space and to the moon? How do you test it? Well, this next article goes over real world case study on Apollo's successful testing and what they did to accomplish it. This was posted by Nick. It's a PDF and it is a detailed technical report on the development of a guidance navigation and control system for space vehicles and outlines the core objectives, design principles, and testing methodologies, implementing to ensure the accuracy of navigation and controls of spacecrafts during missions. And also goes over NASA's Minimum Cost Testing Policy, which aim to achieve cost effective software testing while maintaining high reliability. And this policy includes new methodologies for economic testing planning, emphasizing financial constraints while delivering an acceptable level of system dependability, and the seven parameter model introduced optimize extensive testing processes, focus on balance testing efforts against program risk and budget limits. This could be applied against any testing efforts, and this document provides insights into engineering challenges, mathematical models, and algorithm deployments to achieve optimal performance. And the section that really stood out for me and this report is it's testing a validation piece to emphasize the importance of vigorous testing protocols to ensure the system performs as expected in real life scenarios, and it goes over all the data and all the things they did to do that.

[00:05:05] Joe Colantonio And as a bonus, you definitely should check our podcast I did with Gerald Weinberg almost ten years ago, who was an engineer who worked on the first American NASA program, and he went over how he designed, tested, and implemented the space tracking networking, which focused on the first multiple program operating systems. Definitely a lot of key insights here as well. A lot of key takeaways, and you can find all those resources and links down below.

[00:05:31] Joe Colantonio What caused the CrowdStrike Microsoft outage that happened a few weeks ago? It's all over LinkedIn, but here's the latest. This article goes on how CrowdStrike has identified a bug in its testing software as the cause for the worldwide outage that affected 8.5 million window machines, and it breaks down how the bug allowed a problematic update to pass validation, leading to system crashes and boot loops to prevent future issues, CrowdStrike plans more thorough testing and hence error handling and staggered deployment strategies.

[00:06:02] Joe Colantonio Up next is a new Playwright course you definitely should check out. So we got so much positive feedback about our AI, Playwright course we released a few weeks ago. We had folks asking for another course focus on using TypeScript. So we decided to create another free course on getting started with Playwright using TypeScript. In this Playwright course is led by Artem, who's a Playwright testing expert goes over how to set up Playwright with TypeScript frameworks from scratch and how to perform browser test automation. There's four main sections of this course. Artem starts off obviously by going over how to set things up to get you up and running quickly. The second part is a hands on overview of Playwright. The third is locating web elements. So you're going to learn a bunch of different syntax, rules, tricks, and techniques and how to find web elements on a web page using Playwright. And he also goes on a ton of different UI components where you'll learn techniques on how to interact with different types of components like input fields, radio buttons, checkboxes, tooltips, and a whole bunch more. You don't want to miss this? Check it out. Register down below and hope to see you there!

[00:07:08] This next blog post is by Lars on how to do proper load testing, and in this article, Lars explains why load testing matters and how load testing can reveal critical vulnerabilities and performance bottlenecks and emphasize the importance of systematic stress testing. And the post outlines specific strategies and tools used in the process. Lars also goes over the roles of performance testers, and highlights real world scenarios where load testing not only prevented potential disasters, but also optimized sites for better user experience. I think this article is great for software testers to recognize the value of load testing to identify and resolve potential site vulnerabilities before they impact your users. And this is a really good proactive approach for using stress testing to assure a more resilient and effective website. You can find that all down below.

[00:07:57] Joe Colantonio You all know I love new tools. Here's another one I just discovered on LinkedIn by Severin, who announced on LinkedIn that he developed a new tool called otelify.sh. What is it? It's a shell script that allows you to instrument almost any application without the need to touch the application's code. And this way you can extract telemetry out of an application within seconds. And it does it by utilizing different zero code instrumentation solutions provided by the Open Telemetry project. Definitely check it out on GitHub to see how to install it and see examples and usage as well.

[00:08:31] Joe Colantonio All right. Let's end things with another Follow the Money Segment. And this is how Lakera AI raised 20 million to ward off malicious prompts on generative AI models. I've never heard of this tool before, but I found out it's an advanced AI security platform designed to protect generative AI applications. It offers solutions like a Lakera Guard for real time security. Lakera Red for pre-deployment stress testing and tools for detecting and preventing data loss. Lakera focused on defending against promt attacks, inappropriate content and data poisoning, and insecure LLM plugins. I think you all should note the increase of points of security in Generative AI applications. And more and more solutions, I think, like this are going to come out, and you should probably become more familiar with them as well.

[00:09:15] All right. For links of everything we value we covered in this news episode. Head on over to the links down below. So that's it for this episode of The Test Guild News Show. I'm Joe, my mission is to help you succeed in creating end-to-end full stack pipeline automation awesomeness, as always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.