AI, Self-Healing Clouds & Performance Breakthroughs! 🔮TGNS80

[00:00:00] Joe Colantonio Have you seen this mind-blowing self-healing test execution cloud solution? What is up with so many companies adding performance testing to automation solutions? And what are some new AI-based features in automation testing? Find out in this episode of the Automation and DevSecOps News Show for the week of May 7th. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and let's do this.

[00:00:22] Joe Colantonio This episode of the TestGuild News Show is sponsored by the awesome folks at Applitools. Are you looking to take your automation projects to the next level? Look no further, than Applitools in the visual AI Validation testing. Trust me, it is a game-changer. Plus, you can try it out for yourself for free by creating an account with the special link I have down below.

[00:00:42] Joe Colantonio So as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, I think you really need to see this new solution by Applitools. It's a self-healing test execution cloud, and if you haven't seen or heard it yet, have a great resource for you to actually get up to speed quickly on what it could do for you. So this webinar will actually go over an introduction to the world's first self-healing tests execution cloud, and it's going to be presented by Adam Carmi, one of the founders of Applitools, and he's going to go over why self-healing is such a highly effective technology that substantially reduces the overhead of maintaining UI-based automated tests by allowing UI elements such as buttons, links, labels, and input fields, be successfully located interact with even following UI changes that would otherwise cause these tests to break. And until today, you probably know self-healing technology has only been available through commercial test automation tools that require teams to abandon their existing test suites and rewrite from scratch using some type of proprietary test language specific to a test tool. Not only does this require substantial time and effort to accomplish, but it also creates an unwanted vendor lock-in as they rewrite test suites that can only be executed by this specific vendor. And that's why Applitool's solution really is head and shoulders above a lot of these other ones. They released the world's first self-healing test infrastructure where teams can now enjoy all the benefits of the best in class self-healing technology just by executing their existing tests and Applitools cloud infrastructure without changing even a single line of test code. And it's once again one of the things you need to see to believe. I highly recommend you register for this webinar because you're going to learn what is self-healing, why it's so useful. So definitely check this out and you can find it in the first link down below. Hope to see you there.

[00:02:27] Joe Colantonio Another solution I came across while I was researching this News Show is around OpenAI for DevOps. So in this post, they announce a new release of A.I. Companion, which is a generative A.I. copilot that streamlines user stories and reduces human errors. And they say this program has already saved 25 million development hours annually and reduces app fillers by 78%. AI Companion can help you generate user story suggestions so you don't have to start from scratch. You can enrich user and story requirements, and it can gather test case suggestions without having to write them. So definitely some cool innovations with A.I. within DevOps. I haven't tried to get myself, but give it a try and let me know what are your thoughts in the comments down below.

[00:03:11] Joe Colantonio Parasoft announced the latest release of its AI-powered API testing solution. And the article goes over to point out what enhancements to measure and analyze separate code coverage. DevOps teams can expect fast, efficient, and accurate verification workflows of the software testing platform that leverages artificial intelligence so its capabilities like simplifying workflows and unified reports for code coverage. QA testers can measure code coverage without needing to access the actual source code and can collect and report of code coverage for distributed microservices and end-to-end test case scenarios. You can create audit trails from modified test files, and virtual assets, and as a file-based correlation of request responses for virtual services. So definitely check that out and let me know your thoughts as well.

[00:03:57] Joe Colantonio Next up, we have a follow the Money segment. And this announcement is how OpenLayer announces 4.8 million C round funding. If you don't know, OpenLayer is an AI testing platform and it helps companies validate their machine learning models and diagnose errors and was founded actually by a former Apple ML engineer. OpenLayer aims to make test-driven development a crucial part of the ML process. The funding will enable the expansion and creation of more sophisticated guardrails in terms robust and fair model behaviors.

[00:04:30] Joe Colantonio And this is a great segway, on an article I just found by Jason Arbon, CEO of TestAI, which is all about why A.I. needs testing. This article emphasizes the importance of rigorous testing for AI to ensure its development aligns with humanity's best interest and with the rapid advancement in AI, which we've seen already in some of these announcements so far. Proper testing is crucial for maintaining control and allowing A.I. to potentially surpass human intelligence. And the article goes on to talk about how A.I bots can have a transformative impact on society as they could outperform humans and certain tasks could provide the services universally at a lower cost and faster speed. But this is a big BUT because this is the main gist of the article is how human testers may be the last one standing in the software engineering profession, working alongside A.I. to ensure optimal performance and functionality. As always, thank you Jason, for a very thoughtful piece on A.I. and testing and what testers really need to know about the impact of A.I. in the software testing profession.

[00:05:36] Joe Colantonio So besides a bunch of AI news articles, I also found a bunch around performance testing.

[00:05:42] Joe Colantonio So I don't know how I missed this last time, but this was at least a few weeks ago. A cool way that you can use Playwright. This is from Marcus, which talks about his team, has recently open-sourced a demo repository demonstrating the power of Playwright Azure Load Testing and Chaos Studio, all running seamlessly with GitHub actions. And the team really is encouraging contributions from the community to enhance the project further. They have Contosotrader app, a simple application that highlights the capabilities of Playwright Azure Load Testing and Azure Chaos Studio in all their innovative cloud testing tools, and this repository includes source code deployment templates and demo scripts, making it an invaluable resource for those looking to explore and experiment with these cutting edge testing tools. So don't miss your opportunity to contribute and learn from this awesome project.

[00:06:32] Joe Colantonio And another tool that introduced performance functionality this week is Mabl. So Dan just posted how Mabl, if you don't know, is a SaaS offering for low code intelligent Test Automation just announced a new load testing feature that allows engineering teams to access the applications performance under production load easily, and this ability is seamlessly integrated into Mabl's SaaS platform, which enables users to get more value from their existing functional test shifting performance testing earlier in the development lifecycle and reducing infrastructure and operational costs. And Dan, also points to a study that shows that application performance has a significant impact and user satisfaction and may have one-second delay in page load time can hurt conversions by up to 7%. However, only 6% of development teams are fully satisfied with the performance testing capabilities. And now with Mabl's new API load testing capabilities, teams can really unify function and nonfunctional tests and then import things like Postman collections for faster test creation. And this approach can significantly lower the barrier to sustainable elaborative performance testing practices, even for teams without dedicated performance testers or tools, which are seen as a big bottleneck for a lot of companies.

[00:07:47] Joe Colantonio I get a lot of people pointing me to this announcement, but actually, it was the first one that actually sent me this link and linked in to this announcement by Postman, and it's an announcement for early access for these for API performance testing and it talks about how API performance testing is essential to providing a great user experience, ensuring APIs can handle the expected load response effectively to changes on demand. So this new feature is going to allow you to measure API response times throughput and error rates under simulated loads, enabling you to optimize and improve API performance, better user experience, identify bottlenecks, latency, and failures, and determine the scalability of your system. And this release focuses on load testing, which aims to observe at benchmark the performance of APIs under expected real-world conditions and what Postman early access, API performance testing. You can assure your APIs meet functional and performance expectations giving your users the best experience possible so you can request early access now and stay ahead of the competition by delivering reliable higher performance APIs.

[00:08:51] And this last article is about a new observability plugin for Jmeter and this plugin allows users to monitor the command line interface or non GUI performance tests with their favorite browser using Prometheus and the enhanced capabilities of the plugin aim to address some of the limitations of Jmeters GUI mode which can consume significant CPU and memory resources affecting test results. And this plugin also offers an endpoint in the open metrics format, exposing these KPIs and making them available to products like Prometheus. And with this new release, Jmeter users can now enjoy more effective analysis and monitoring capabilities without compromising the test results.

[00:09:33] And for links of everything value, we covered in this news episode, head in over to the links in the first comment down below. And while you're there, make sure to check out our awesome sponsor Applitools Free account Offer and discover how to take your automation testing to the next level leveraging Visual A.I. 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.