Trailblazers of Technology: Quality Engineering, Automation Growth, and AI Innovations TGNS91

[00:00:00] Joe Colantonio How can you unlock and transform quality engineering? Is Selenium 4.11 the most important release in years? And what is Bits AI? Find out in this episode of the Test Guild News Show for the week of August 6th. Grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and let's do this.

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[00:00:35] Joe Colantonio Do you have any plans for this Wednesday? If not, I highly recommend you check out this first resource. So this Wednesday I'm actually going to have an awesome conversation with Rajesh from Cigniti Technologies. They speak with multiple clients all over the world at enterprise levels, they really understand the different struggles that people face with testing and automation. He will be joining me for a Free webinar on how to unlock and transform quality engineering. He will actually be discussing a lot of these different issues and potential solutions that you may be encountering yourself. So I'm going to explore the current market scenario, common organization struggles, and how next-generation solutions can usher in a transformative wave of Quality Engineering. So as I mentioned, Cigniti works on a lot of different companies all over the world, and they're going to show some different key components of their framework called BlueSwan. That's really a progressive software testing platform and how it's helped addressed multiple issues in different organizations along the way. So the session is going to go over how to really speed up digital delivery, how to enhance software quality, how to cut down on expenses, and how to provide remarkable customer experience, which after all, is the end all be all of all software development, I think. So register now for the webinar. Really look forward to your questions and hope to see you there.

[00:01:49] Joe Colantonio So next up is a follow the Money segment with TestGridio. We talked about them last week and I just saw this posted a few days ago. So if you missed the last week, Test Grid is one of the leading providers of end-to-end automation infrastructure done a few types of services. They actually just secured multi-million dollar pre-series A funding from a private investor. This was posted on LinkedIn by the Test Grid, CEO Harry Rao, who shared the news and highlighted the company's commitment to providing an industry-leading, bootstrapped, and profitable end-to-end automation testing solution. And this commitment has just shown the transformative growth and widespread global adoption of Test Grid over the past 12 months and the investments going to be used to expand Test Grid's AI-powered test automation capabilities and its global reach. Taking codeless automation more accessible to developers and testers worldwide. You can check that out in the first comment down below.

[00:02:46] All right. The latest release of Selenium has been released this week and what major contributor has said that it is the most important release for him in years. Let's find out. Titus was a key contributor to the Selenium project announced on LinkedIn. That's Selenium native driver manager has finally surpassed third-party driver managers in functionality. For several years, Titus has maintained the web driver's gem for Ruby Selenium users, which has been downloaded 57 million times. However, he is now encouraging users to move to Selenium 4.11 as it offers superior features. So there's a bunch of new Selenium features. For example, uses values directly from the browser's options class for browser versions, proxy, and binary locations. It looks for drivers on a path for backward capabilities and ensures that the located browser is the one the driver actually uses. It also now provides thorough logging-in error messages, including links to get more information, and more importantly Selenium 4.11 uses the new Chrome for testing products to manage the chrome browsers as well as the driver ensuring showing the requested version in the matched drivers are used. And to learn more, you want to check Selenium's official documentation, which provides a detailed guide on the Selenium manager and a bunch of other new features as well. And as always, thank you, Titus, and all the Selenium contributors for making this latest release happen. Really appreciate you all.

[00:04:11] Joe Colantonio So another exciting announcement is from the folks at Ultimate QA on a new post on Playwright that I think you're going to enjoy. And this was posted by Nikolay Advolodkin, who is the founder of UltimateQA, and it actually sheds light on integrating Playwright reportage with Azure DevOps pipelines. If you don't know, Azure DevOps pipeline is a Microsoft cloud-based CI/CD platform, and this supports integration with various tools and frameworks including Plawright. And a key feature of Playwright is customizable reporting, which defines how the results of your tests are reported. This post details the difference between build and release pipelines in Azure DevOps and provides a comprehensive guide on how to set up various reporters, including the publish HTML report task, JUnit report, Playwright report as an artifact, and RS test reporter plug-in. Each report has its own pros and cons. And the choice depends on the specific needs and nature of your project. This integration allows for more efficient and detailed reporting of test results, enhancing the overall development process. Real detailed. A great resource for you all if using Playwright and Azure DevOps, and definitely check it out in the first comment down below.

[00:05:18] Hey, do you like books? If you could tell. I sure do. And you like testing in DevOps, if so, then I have another awesome resource for you as well. So if you don't know Tristan Lombard actually runs a monthly book club. And this month I'm going to be covering Noemi Ferrera's new book, How to Test a Time Machine: A Practical Guide to Test Architecture and Automation. I was lucky enough to get an advance copy to review this book. I highly recommend you check it out. I gave the foreword for the book as well because I believed in it that much as well. You can grab a copy for the book and actually join a small group on an online discussion all about it to learn more about different practical world examples that you can implement to make your automation even better. Noemi is a world-renowned automation expert, and the insights she provides in this book are going to provide you with valuable skills that are going to help you with the day-to-day work. I highly recommend you join the book club and join them this session as well. And hope to see you all there.

[00:06:12] Joe Colantonio So another company just released some new innovations around monitoring using A.I. And this is how Datadog, a leading player in the application monitoring software business has announced the launch of a new large language model observability features and its own generative AI assistant Bits AI. And this large language model observability tool aims to help customers troubleshoot problems with LLM-based artificial intelligence applications. And it does a lot to analyze request prompts and responses to detect and resolve model drifts, and issues, and helps to identify opportunities to fine-tune models and ensure a better experience for end users. In addition, Datadog's new generative AI assistant Bits AI scans the customer's observability data and other sources of information to answer questions quickly, providing recommendations and build automated remediations for application problems. This tool is designed to help customers derive insights from their observability data and resolve application issues faster. To check it out and let me know if it helps you in the comments down below.

[00:07:15] So besides monitoring and observability, another news article I found around AI, is around security. So traceable AI, a security firm, has launched new digital fraud prevention capabilities to protect businesses from fraudulent activities across API's digital interfaces. This innovation is really significant in the post-COVID era for businesses face crosses due to fraud. So the company's unique approach focuses on API behavioral patterns of vulnerabilities at the identity layer, providing early detection of cyber criminals. This solution is especially beneficial for sectors like financial services, healthcare, retail, telecommunication, and governments, where secure APIs and data protections are crucial. Traceable AI's new capabilities include constructing a unique fingerprint for each user's identity and behavior and leveraging Graph machine learning to uncover hidden correlations across various dimensions for enhanced threat detection. The company's CTO, Sanjay, emphasizes its dynamic and adaptive approach to combatting digital fraud in API abuse, aims to anticipate threats, and provides organizations with an advantage in safeguarding their digital assets.

[00:08:27] Joe Colantonio So in a security Follow the Money segment. Endor Labs has successfully raised $70 million, so Endor Labs has successfully raised 70 million series around funding just 10 months after its inception. And if you don't know, I've never heard of Endor Labs before. It's a DevSecOps platform, and it plans to use the funding to develop efficient application security programs that eliminate the developer productivity taps. And the company's foundation is built on open-source software governance aiming to help teams select and maintain high-quality and secure open-source software from the outset. And the company, CEO, Varun emphasizes that Endor Labs is meeting an urgent need in the market with new funding. The company plans to go bigger and broader, focusing on building efficient application security programs so that security and development teams address the most critical risks.

[00:09:20] Joe Colantonio Alright. For links to everything we covered in this News episode. Head 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 AI. So that's it for this episode of the Test Guild News Show, I'm Joe, and 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.