Observability, Monitoring For Testers, TDD for Cypress, & More

Read on to discover why observability and software monitoring matter for testers. TDD for Cypress and other top news in DevSecOps, Automation Testing, Performance Testing, Security Testing, and more in this edition of the @TestGuild news show for the week of Sep 25th.

So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea, and let's do this.

The Benefits of Visual AI in Testing

The awesome folks at Applitools sponsor this episode of the Test Guild news show. Applitools is a next-generation test automation platform powered by visual AI, which helps you increase quality, accelerate delivery, and reduce costs. Well, what I think is the world's most intelligent test automation platform. But seeing is believing.

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First Up Automation Testing

AI Augmented Software Quality Management platform

Over the past few months, I've seen many AI-driven quality platforms help you with test management. Along those lines, Katalon just launched an AI Augmented Software Quality Management platform .?

So I found this announcement on LinkedIn via Gokul Sridharan about this new Katalon platform. They built the Katalon Platform to help you get visibility throughout your entire quality lifecycle. And so it handles things like :

• Tests new builds
• Authors tests
• Provisions execution environments
• Executes test suites
• Provides release readiness insights for production
• It offers a feedback loop to agile software teams and business owners

?The announcement goes on to talk about why they developed this platform. One reason mentioned was that building software is complex and challenging, but creating software people love is even more complicated. And so they created a platform to help you understand challenges faced by teams of all sizes, creating high-quality software in compressed periods. And the Katalon platform provides a holistic approach that leverages the entire team's strength to quickly and efficiently deliver quality products.?

It also includes things like A.I-powered visual testing, flexible development environments with no code features for users, and a free version.?

If you're struggling with the current test management of your automation, here's one of the tools you should check out.

TDD for Cypress

If you're struggling with the current test management of your automation, here's one of the tools you should check out.

Suppose you use Cypress and you're into component testing. In that case, I have an excellent resource for you on how TDD with Cypress components testing can help you and your teams accelerate your front-end engineering and take it to the next level.?

And the resource Murat Ozcan posted is a Gitbook.?

It has many different chapters and all types of things that will help you with component testing, specifically for Cypress with code examples; it's a fantastic resource. You should read it if you're doing anything with Cypress in component testing.

Make Live Monitoring Your Friend

So are you a tester? If so, do you do live monitoring of your software in production? If not, you definitely should. And here are some reasons why.?

And this article is by George, and it talks about why live monitoring by software testing engineers should be your best friend .?

And George covers what you need for:

1. Why monitor post-production??
2. What kind of data should be collected??
3. How often should data be collected??

Geroge concludes that out that:

Live monitoring for testers helps quickly find any performance issues, prevents problems from occurring in the first place, and provides valuable insights that can be used to improve the application.?

Make monitoring your friend check it out for more info.

AI with UFT ONE

How many of you still use MicroFocus UFT? I know the company I worked with went through a transition. They used all Mercury or HP products until maybe 2015, and then they went and switched all of it to open source.?

Their thinking was that this would fix all their automation issues. Spoiler alert - it didn't. It turns out switching tooling doesn't improve a broken culture?(that's a story for another newsletter :)

This next article is about a new release of UFT that you should check if you are using UFT. Or, if you haven't used UFT in a while, they have some cool new features that maybe you should revisit and see if it's now something that you should check out for your team.?

So UFT One is finally released, and some of the new features are included are:

• Expanded artificial intelligence capabilities to SAP Testing.?
• The ability to test SAP GUI for Windows using the AI-based testing?
• Using AI to identify additional controls on the web, mobile, and SAP GUI
• Creating complex object descriptions using the AI inspection or AI record feature
• Automating remote AI service set up
• Performance enhancements on remote AI service as the services

If you haven't seen it in a while, I hear from people that have used it that they're pretty impressed by it. So definitely check out their video of all the new features, and let me know what you think.

Observability for Testers

So we talked about why live monitoring matters for testers, but how about observability??

So this next article by Parveen Khan from ThoughtWorks is about why observability shouldn't matter for testers.?

The post goes over some things like:

• Symptoms of lack of observability
• How observability is multi-dimensional
• How does testing observability meet or relate to one another
• How to get started with the observability
• How do you improve your work's software by using observability and much more?

Starwest

I'll be honest; I wouldn't say I like talking at onsite events. I love online events. Online events are my jam, but the folks at Karate Labs have convinced me to attend the Starwest conference next week .

I'm not a speaker per se but rather hosting a roundtable. And so I get to speak to some excellent experts like

So it will be a tool agnostic session, even though Karate Labs sponsor it. It's going to be more of an informal session around topics like:

• System / API Testing
• Low-Code / No-Code
• AI/ML
• People Management

It's going to be a lot of fun, and I think you'll learn a lot.?

So if you're going to be at Starwest, I hope to see you there.?

I'll be around also. So if you have anything to do with automation or performance testing and want to be on the podcast, I'll have all my gear with me.?

Next up, performance in Site Reliability News.

$ Chaos Engineering Startup $

So this is a money segment entitled Chaos Engineering Startup Steadybit raises $7.8 million. If you don't know, Steadybit is a chaos engineering platform designed to reduce downtime proactively and provide systems visibility to detect issues early using chaos.?

Steadybit’s platform can define applications’ steady states by integrating existing load tests and monitoring tools, injecting failure modes such as network latency, and checking for resilience best practices and policies.

I don't think "chaos" is a good name for this testing approach. I think it should be called resilience testing. Many people can understand that more, especially from a tester's perspective. And also in, the statement from the co-founder Benjamin Wilms of Steadybit mentions resilience in this article

Resilience is a team sport, and because resilience is a shared responsibility, we developed Steadybit as the chaos engineering platform that is equally beneficial to site reliability engineers, DevOps, and developers

Besides SREs and Developers, I'm going to throw in testers because I think if you're not doing chaos engineering. You're a tester; you should be involved. After all, you have a lot of knowledge in this area that could help people do this even better.?

Suppose you want to know more about chaos engineering or SteadyBit. In that case, you can also check out my podcast interview with Benjamin I recorded last year on my TestGuild Performance and SRE podcast.

Next up, Security Testing News

GitHub Hack

Do you use GitHub? How about CircleCI? You will want to pay attention to this next news article.

This goes over a new phishing campaign targeting GitHub accounts that are making its rounds on how fake CircleCI accounts are stealing accounts. Criminals are currently distributing a phishing email in which they impersonate a Continuous Integration and delivery platform CircleCI.

And the email is being sent to GitHub users and warns them that their CircleCI use of the terms of privacy policy has changed, and they need to sign into their GitHub accounts to accept new terms.

And the article goes on to explain the attack in a little more detail and what domains are being used for those phishing emails.

?API Security Testing Suite

And speaking of security, I also found a new tool called StackHawk, which recently expanded its API security testing suite . And so the deeper API security coverage suite they just developed is based on dynamic application security testing or DAST. The latest release also adds the ability to add test scripts in data collected by tools such as Postman or Cypress to guide scanners by requiring access to API documentation.

This seems like a cool development, and I like how it integrates with some of these functional tools, so you get multiple uses out of your scripts.

That's a Wrap

So that's it for this Test Guild News Show Newsletter edition.?

I'm Joe Colantonio, and my mission is to help you succeed in creating end-to-end full-stack Pipeline automation awesomeness.?Click to get my 10 test automation tips. ?

As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.

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