About This Episode:
What is the state of AI in Quality engineering? How does the new Lighthouse API help you to measure performance and best practices throughout a user flow? Why is having threat modeling skills critical to helping you break into cyber security testing?
Find out the answers to these and other end-to-end full pipeline, DevOps, automation, performance, and security testing in this episode of the test guild news show for the week of Nov 7.
Exclusive Sponsor
This episode of the TestGuild News Show is sponsored by the folks at Applitools. Applitools is a next-generation test automation platform powered by Visual AI. Increase quality, accelerate delivery and reduce cost with the world’s most intelligent test automation platform. Seeing is believing, so create your free account now!
Links to News Mentioned in this Episode
TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:
00:00 What's new
00:25 Sponsored by Applitools
00:58 The current state of artificial intelligence in QA
01:39 Healthy Testing Habits
02:38 Michael Bolton Katalon Studio examination
03:45 Appium Dashboard plugin
04:15 Angles Dashboard Solution
04:47 Testim and Salesforce support
05:24 Lighthouse new API with Playwright
06:15 Soak Testing
06:49 Threat Modeling for Newbies
07:35 New security testing platform Oxeye
08:59 My two year layoff anniversary
NEWS LINKS
Applitools: https://rcl.ink/xroZw
AI Report: https://applitools.info/hwh
Testing Habits: https://links.testguild.com/fHOt0
Katalon Review: https://links.testguild.com/L6Nfe
Appium Plugin: https://links.testguild.com/6XCV4
Angles: https://links.testguild.com/iCbPw
Testim: https://links.testguild.com/KyMhS
Lighthouse: https://links.testguild.com/A3pxv
Soak Testing: https://links.testguild.com/jDH64
Threat Modeling: https://links.testguild.com/8wN9w
Oxeye: https://links.testguild.com/2OU2t
News
[00:00:56] First up, automation news. [00:00:57][1.1]
[00:00:58] So I have an awesome resource for you on a comprehensive report that provides a detailed examination of the current state of artificial intelligence across many use cases in the field of quality engineering and centers around a key question. How can A.I Make quality validations smarter? And this resource comes powered by via Applitools. It's a webinar, and they also have a white paper that is going to take a deep dive into some key insights they definitely should check go on A.I Across the industry. Understanding how visually AI actually helped shorten the release cycle, how to leverage AI to scale test automation and release faster, and a whole other bunch of topics that you don't want to miss. So check that out in the links down below. [00:01:38][39.3]
[00:01:39] And besides leveraging AI to help you with your test automation creation and maintenance, there are some other habits that you should learn to help you create what they call healthy testing habits. And so this brings me to your next resource Healthy Testing Habits, which is the latest blog post by Kristin Jackvony that dives into six key testing habits to help you and your team adapt to test automation. So some really good insights around different practices you should have that really help your team accelerate to have more reliable automation. The first one is to check your overnight test and fix any failures. The second habit is run unit and integration tests for the rebuild. The third is setting up a regular security check, four which I also love is running load tests before releasing, five ping your APIs at regular intervals and six is set up monitoring alerts to actually read all the awesomeness around each of these habits check out that blog post and follow Kristin, and I'll have a link to that once again in the links down below. [00:02:37][58.7]
[00:02:38] Also besides habits are a lot of automation tools out there, and a lot of them promise you certain features and functionality, and I always recommend teams try them out for themselves because your experience with one tool may be different than someone else's experience with the tool. And this brings us to our next resource by Michael Bolton, who's documenting his experience with multiple tools. He has a really extensive overview of exactly how he used the tool and his thoughts around his experience. So this particular one goes over a Katalan studio, but he also did one on mabl, I believe, a few months ago. And as I mentioned, it's a very long blog post that gives a summary. What he did to set up the platform, his is testing notes, the different tests he ran, and his experience with different features and functionality of the tool, along with a bug summary of what he found to be what he considered bugs with this particular application. It's definitely a deep dive on all these tools, but as I always recommend, you should try it out yourself and see what your experience is because a lot of times I try a tool and my experience is much different than someone else's. So this is a great review of someone else's experience, so you should definitely check out. But also, don't be afraid to try out, choose yourself, and reach your own conclusion as well. [00:03:44][66.5]
[00:03:45] So speaking of tools, if you use Appium if you're looking for a way to easily debug them I found a new solution for you on LinkedIn by Sudharsan on a plugin he created to help you debug Appium using a dashboard plugin that you can find on GitHub repo now. And this plugin provides dashboard views similar to Browser Stack, where it presents the complete session details along with text logs, device logs, and a whole bunch of other awesomest like video recordings of the session and a lot more. So if using Appium definitely give it a try and let me know what you think. [00:04:15][29.7]
[00:04:15] And speaking of Dash porting, another solution I found was also on and this was posted by Sergio on a new plug-in I never heard of before called Angles, which is an open-source dashboard that provides you that allows you to use multiple frameworks in major programming. Languages still have one central location to see all the results. Seems like a really cool solution. I just I've never seen this before, so thank you, Sergio, for posting this and going over some of the features that are including visual comparison, sending up ignore boxes, automatic cleanups, test cases, test matrixes. [00:04:46][30.6]
[00:04:47] And another hot topic I've been seeing the past year is an explosion in tools coming out that help support Salesforce. And one of these tools that have been around for a little bit now is Testim, but they just came off the new announcement for their introduction for Testim for Salesforce, and this article just goes over some of the benefits of how to automate Salesforce applications using the AI-powered tool like Testim and Testim actually went in, they help create features to help deliver new capabilities that handle prevalent salesforce testing challenges. [00:05:19][32.4]
[00:05:20] Next up, performance and reliability news. [00:05:23][2.2]
[00:05:24] So only weeks away from Black Friday and as a team ready for this, there are some tools that actually can help you do some preliminary high-level things to make sure that your application is able to handle an increase in workload and make sure your applications are performant before it's too late. One of those tools that a lot of teams use is Lighthouse. So this next article should be really helpful to take in your performance and user experience to the next level. So what's neat about the Lighthouse new API User Flow API is you can use puppeteer to use it to script page loads and trigger synthetic user interactions in Lighthouse can then be invoked to in multiple ways to capture key insights during those interactions. That means a performance can be measured during a page load and during interaction with the page. I think it's a must-know tool for sure. It's free and every developer on your team should be using Lighthouse. [00:06:14][50.8]
[00:06:15] Also, I find another article by k6 on finding dot net memory leaks through soak testing, which is a topic I haven't heard a lot about in recent years. So really glad to see this new resource updated for 2021 and beyond. Carlos and he walks you through the basics of memory leaks and dot net what they are, how they occur, and why they matter. It also shows how possibly to use techniques and tools already at your disposal to do a particular kind of performance test called the soak test. So really great resource there. Once again, this will be in the link down below. [00:06:47][31.7]
[00:06:47] Next up, Security testing news. [00:06:49][1.4]
[00:06:49] So this next resource by Vandana, who is one of my go-to security resources. She posts a lot in the area. She's an expert. So if you're not following her definitely follow her and check out a lot of resources she's creating on YouTube and on the web, and this one is for folks, I want to actually break into cyber security. One of the areas that they should know more about is threat modeling. And as I mentioned, she has a playlist of a bunch of other security topics you should know as well. So definitely a must-watch resource and a must-know contact in the security space to stay up to speed, to know what you need to do in order to get into cyberspace. If you're looking to get cyberspace, or even to make sure that your chops are up to speed. If you're currently a newbie, maybe in the security space, definitely check that out. [00:07:35][45.4]
[00:07:35] In this last news item is a Follow the Money article. To me, as I said, there are key indicators of where the market is going, and that is anytime anyone invests money and this is how Oxeye has received five point one million in seed financial round led by MoreVc. I think is really interesting about this particular application or platform was it was built for AppSec, Dev, and DevOps teams it was designed to help teams tackle cloud-native challenges like containers, APIs, microservices clusters, and other cloud-based components. There's actually also a tool I've never heard of before, so I'm always looking to learn about new tools and technologies to try out to see how it can help my team with their testing efforts. So definitely give Oxeye a look and let me know what you think. And I think as I said over the past few news shows, you know, we're hearing more about containerization, cloud-native type challenges, APIs, microservices. So this is right on trend and what I've been saying, and we probably need tools to help us along this way, as well as we're developing software with these newer technologies to make sure that not only are they functional, are they perform it, but also make sure that they're secure. So definitely check out these technologies as well to help you and your teams accelerate with developing awesome applications that delight your customers. [00:08:58][82.5]
[00:08:59] So those are all the news items for the week of November 7th. Definitely. Check them all out and the links down below. And also make sure if you haven't all ready to create your free account now without any tools to check out how visual validation testing could take your automation to the next level. Using the most intelligent automation platform I know of and that is Applitools. So show them some love, show the show some love by clicking on that link, giving it a try because I really think it's going to help you and your teams like it helped me and my teams back in the day when I was using this when I worked at a real job. [00:09:29][30.7]
[00:09:30] And I forgot to mention in the last show that November marks my second year layoff anniversary. I was laid off two years ago. But I decided to Test Guild full time, so I just want to give a big shadow of thanks to all the sponsors, all the folks that attend my Guild Conferences or my blog posts, viewers, all my podcasts listeners. Anyone that's helped me throughout these past few years to help me keep the lights on on the TestGuild. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. And as always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers! [00:09:30][0.0]
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