Automation Conspiracy Theories and More! TGNS78

[00:00:00] Joe Colantonio How is Google sneaking automation testing into Chrome? And is this going to start a battle between Google and Microsoft? What company recently raised 50 million in Series D round funding? And I was on the fence with generative AI is the future of automation testing. Find out in this automation and DevSecOps news shows up so for the week of April 9th. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and let's do this.

[00:00:26] Joe Colantonio This episode of the TestGuild News Show is sponsored by the awesome folks at Applitools. If you're looking to take your animation project to new heights, Applitools, and the visual validation testing are game changers. I've used it myself in my day-to-day career and we couldn't do what we were trying to do without visual validation using Applitools. But don't just take my word for it. Try it for yourself today by creating a free account now by using that special link in the first comment down below. And while you're there, why not like, rate, and subscribe to alert every time I release a new episode?

[00:00:59] Joe Colantonio First up, automation news.

[00:01:04] Joe Colantonio So I missed last week's news show for a bunch of different things. Mainly because I was at SeleniumConf the week before. I didn't have time to catch up. But at SeleniumConf, a lot of people are telling me how they saw my posts on generative API. So if you missed this, I think you definitely want to check it out. So it's still not too late if you're watching this now, this event happening on April 12th and it's all about generative AI, the future of testing. MAGNIFAI who I saw at SeleniumConf, really cool company is actually going to have an expert panel that's going to discuss the current state of artificial intelligence, the practical uses, and limitations of generative AI as well, so you can discover things like the AI boom, its role in the software development cycle, the capabilities of generative AI and AI-powered visual testing platforms, and why human capabilities are still needed in the quality assurance process. So if you want to explore the possibilities and limitations of AI and you haven't signed up yet for this event. I highly recommend you do. And you can check that out in the first comment down below.

[00:02:05] Joe Colantonio So also at SeleniumConf, I got to speak a lot of people, two that really come to mind right now. Michael Mintz and Dmitriy from EPAM. So Michael Mintz is the creator of Selenium Base and he had his laptop. He said, Check this out, what I just noticed and he brought up a Chrome browser and he started talking about something that I think a lot of people don't know about yet because I was caught off guard as well. So what he did is said, check this out. So you want to bring up the developer console within Chrome, click on the dropdown and notice there's a new area. At least I don't know when this was added, but there's one called recorder. And in the recorder, notice this is interesting. It has a way to record a user journey on your web app, replay the recording to check the flow if it's working and they're using a performance trace, or you can export it as a Puppeteer testing script. So I think this is a direct shot at Microsoft, at least, what Michael mentioned, because obviously, Microsoft has Playwright, it's been gaining a lot of steam. I think Google feels left out here. So they're going to try to revive Puppeteer to now compete with Microsoft's Playwright. So to me, it gets kind of weird now when companies start competing with their different automation frameworks because then it's going to cause fragmentation. It's going to be just like it was in the 90s. That's why I don't know if it's a good thing to have companies like Google and Microsoft involved. And that's why using an open-source solution like Selenium has some benefits because it's not tied to a corporation like these other two solutions are. Anyway, just something to keep your eye on. If you haven't tried this functionality yet, I highly recommend you do. And maybe it's time to learn a little more about Puppeteer as well. Also, Dmitriy mentioned this brings up an interesting thing because that's why he thinks Microsoft bought GitHub because they've been training their AI model against GitHub and that's why when you use Chat GPT, it's able to generate code because it was trained on all the code within GitHub. So just another interesting insight into some ethics or things of how the world is changing and what to be aware of when these companies purchase other companies, what their underlining motive is. Thank you, Michael and Dmitriy, for sharing this insight with me at SeleniumConf. Appreciate you both.

[00:04:19] Joe Colantonio So I don't know if you've been seeing it, but a lot of software companies, software testing companies, rolling out ambassador programs, maybe wondering, why should I care? Why should I listen? Well, I have an article on why ambassador programs are really beneficial to being involved with. And so she listed a bunch of programs you can get involved with, with the community. The one I'm really excited about, obviously, is Applitools, because Applitools made me an official ambassador a few weeks ago, really excited about it because I've been using Applitools since 2015, ever since I interviewed Adam Carmi on my podcast, and then I brought it into our huge company I was working with. So if you haven't checked out these ambassador programs, I definitely recommend you do. And thank you, Pricilla, for all these links.

[00:05:03] Joe Colantonio So I also found an article on Playwright you definitely should check out as well. This was posted by Stuart Thomas, who pointed to an article by Kat. Kat has been on the show before and not the Automation Guild awesome resource for Playwright and performance. And it talks about a blog she recently released for Zoopla. And the article, it's all about making engineers love Playwright with the software design patterns, and she goes over a few of the benefits to support this idea and goes over some popular object or design patterns that you need to know about, especially with Playwright. It's really going to get buy in from your engineering team and your developers.

[00:05:41] Joe Colantonio Speaking of generative A.I., there's another resource from the awesome folks at Applitools on ChatGPT that you should register for as well. And this is on unlocking the power of ChatGPT and AI and test automation with some next steps are that you can implement to get involved in this new wave of AI in testing. So by joining this webinar, you're going to learn practical applications for the use of these technologies like GitHub Copilot and Applitools self-healing cloud. And a lot of the benefits still around handling flaky tests and handling negative edge case tests. You'll learn how to enhance your test automation strategies. Just make them faster, more stable, and easier to implement. You can take home techniques to generate realistic test data in different contexts. You're going to gain insights on how to get buy in of different tools to find the best possible solutions for your test automation needs. So if you haven't already, I highly recommend you register now for this event and hope to see you there.

[00:06:43] Joe Colantonio And so it just seems like Playwright is starting to get more and more users and you can tell how different projects are getting buy-ins from companies by features that they start releasing. And here's one by Lambda tests that enhances their Playwright capabilities. And this is how Lambda Tests upgrades its Playwright automation testing experience with the addition of its AI-powered integrated test intelligence. And they talk a little bit about why they started investing a little more in Playwright. So given Playwright's increasing usage across the business world, they're excited to provide their customers with a deeper and more intuitive view of their testing, enabling them to identify issues faster and optimize their testing process. And goes over how to consistently try to upgrade their automation offerings. And so that's why they just introduced the digital Experience Test Cloud with Playwright as kind of one of the main features of that release. So I'm always looking for different ways to leverage automation.

[00:07:41] Joe Colantonio So this next article is how you can use test automation with the value stream to get more benefit out of your automation efforts. And this is about how the company Planview and UIPath partnered to optimize test automation with the value stream management capabilities. What they did is they integrated UIPath business automation platform with their Planview market-shaping value stream management solution. And by combining the two, you can now improve automating repetitive and time consuming tasks, reducing manual errors, and accelerating the delivery of your products. And the reason why I bring it up is rather than just focus completely on functional automation, there are all other kinds of automation you can look into. And here's another awesome solution for how you can leverage automation to help you beyond just functional automation.

[00:08:28] Joe Colantonio Next up, performance in Site Reliability News.

[00:08:31] Joe Colantonio And this next article is a Follow the Money segment on how a company recently raised $50 million. This was posted by Jennette, and she announce how Honeycomb recently raised 50 million in Series D round funding. And so it just shows the type of support that's going on within the observability space. So if you're not involved in observability, that's just one of those signs that say, Hey, maybe I should get involved in this, because it seems to be a growing area that I should have skills in to help my career as well.

[00:09:05] Joe Colantonio Next up, Security news.

[00:09:07] Joe Colantonio So this article is over a new feature that was just released by a company in the security API testing space. And now little goes over how Stack Hawk offers enterprise customers the ability to implement modern DAST and API security testing with control and visibility across various teams. This goes into detail a little more about the new feature to help enterprises and a little more about the company. If you haven't heard about Stack Hawk before. And for links of everything of value we covered in this news episode. Head on over to the links in the first comment down below. And while you're there, make sure to check out our sponsor Applitools free account offer and discover how to take your automation testing to the next level. Leveraging Visual API. 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.