Is Selenium 4.11 the most important release in years?

Is Selenium 4.11 the most important release in years?

How can you unlock and transform quality engineering?

And what is Bits AI?

Find out in this episode of the Test Guild Newsletter for the week of August 6th. Grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea, and let's do this.

Visual Validation Testing Must Have

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How to Unlock & Transform Quality Engineering

On Wednesday, I had an awesome conversation with Rajesh from Cigniti Technologies, who joined me on a webinar about unlocking and transforming quality engineering. He shared many of these issues and potential solutions you may encounter when working in the quality engineering space.

He explored the current market scenarios, common organization struggles, and how next-generation solutions can usher in a transformative wave of Quality Engineering.

Cigniti works on many different companies worldwide, and over the years, baked their experience in what works in quality and testing into some key components of their framework called BlueSwan. The folks that joined saw their progressive software testing platform in action and how it's helped address multiple issues in different organizations.

Rajesh also went over how to speed up digital delivery, enhance software quality, cut down on expenses, and provide a remarkable customer experience.

If you missed it – no worries – it will be available on demand shortly.

AI-Powered Investment

Last week TestGrid.io, a leading provider of end-to-end automation cloud and on-premise testing solutions, secured multi-million dollar Pre-Series A funding from the private investment firm of Andy Gaur, the founder, and CEO of Compunnel.

TestGrid's CEO, Harry Rao, shared the exciting news on LinkedIn, highlighting the company's commitment to providing an industry-leading, bootstrapped, and profitable end-to-end automation testing solution. This commitment has catalyzed transformative growth and widespread global adoption over the past 12 months.

The investment will expand TestGrid's AI-powered test automation capabilities and global reach, making codeless automation more accessible to developers and testers worldwide. This marks a significant step forward for TestGrid, as it continues to revolutionize the automation testing field.

Most Important Selenium Release in Years?

Selenium 4.11 has been hailed as one of the most important releases in years by Titus Fortier.

Why?

On LinkedIn, Titus Fortier, a key contributor to the Selenium project, announced that Selenium's native driver manager has finally surpassed third-party driver managers in functionality. For seven years, Fortier has maintained a webdrivers gem for Ruby Selenium users, which has been downloaded 57 million times. However, he is now encouraging users to move to Selenium 4.11, for its new driver manager and other superior features.

Selenium 4.11 also uses values directly from the browser Options class for the browser version, proxy, and binary location. It looks for drivers on PATH for backward compatibility and ensures that the located browser is the one the driver actually uses. It also provides thorough logging and error messages, including links to get more information.

Most importantly, Selenium 4.11 uses the new Chrome for Testing product to manage the Chrome browser as well as the driver, ensuring that the requested version and the matching driver are used.

Meanwhile, Selenium's official documentation provides a detailed guide on the Selenium Manager, a binary generated with Rust that manages driver installation. The Selenium Manager is still in beta and opt-in, but it promises to offer more features in the future.

Playwright + Azure DevOps Pipelines

A recent post on Ultimate QA has shed light on integrating Playwright reporters with Azure DevOps Pipelines.

Azure DevOps Pipeline, a Microsoft cloud-based CI/CD platform, supports integration with various tools and frameworks, including Playwright. A key feature of Playwright is its customizable reporting, which defines how the results of your tests are reported.

The post details the difference between Build and Release Pipelines in Azure DevOps. It provides a comprehensive guide on how to set up various reporters, including the PublishHtmlReport task, JUnit report, Playwright report as an artifact, and the VSTest reporter plugin. Each reporter has its own pros and cons, and the choice depends on specific needs and the nature of the project.

This integration allows for more efficient and detailed reporting of test results, enhancing the overall development process.

Traceable's release of Digital Fraud Prevention.

Traceable AI, a cybersecurity firm, has launched new digital fraud prevention capabilities to protect businesses from fraudulent activities across APIs and digital interfaces. This innovation is particularly significant in the post-COVID era, where businesses face high costs due to fraud.

The company's unique approach focuses on API behavioral patterns and vulnerabilities at the identity layer, providing early detection of cyber criminals. This solution is especially beneficial for sectors like financial services, healthcare, retail/e-commerce, telecommunications, and government, where secure APIs and data protection 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 Nagaraj, emphasized its dynamic and adaptive approach to combating digital fraud and API abuse, aiming to anticipate threats and provide organizations with an advantage in safeguarding their digital assets.

DevOps Book Club

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, the awesome Tristan Lombard runs a monthly book club. And this month, it will cover 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 that you check it out. I also gave the foreword for the book because I believed in it that much. You can grab a copy of the book and join a small group on an online discussion about it to learn more about different practical world examples you can implement to improve your automation. Noemi is a world-renowned automation expert, and her insights in this book will provide valuable skills that will help you with the day-to-day work. I highly recommend you join the book club and this session. And hope to see you all there.

Datadog announces Bits AI: an AI-powered observability assistant

In the realm of application monitoring and AI, Datadog Inc., a leading player in the application monitoring software business, has announced the launch of new large language model (LLM) observability features and its own generative AI assistant, Bits AI.

The new LLM observability tool aims to help customers troubleshoot problems with LLM-based artificial intelligence applications. It works by analyzing request prompts and responses to detect and resolve model drift and hallucinations, helping 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, provide 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.

Endor Labs

In other application security and developer productivity news, Endor Labs has successfully raised $70 million in its Series A funding round just 10 months after its inception. The funding was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, Dell Technologies Capital, and Section 32, with support from over 30 esteemed industry leaders.

Endor Labs, a DevSecOps platform, plans to use the funding to develop efficient application security programs that eliminate the developer productivity tax. 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.

The company's CEO, Varun Badhwar, emphasized that Endor Labs is meeting an urgent need in the market. With the new funding, the company plans to go bigger and broader, focusing on building effective application security programs that let security and development teams address the most critical risks.

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 DevSecops automation awesomeness.?

Click to get my 10 test automation tips.?

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

Next Step

In my new book?Automation Awesomeness: 260 actionable affirmations to improve your QA and automation testing skills, I hope to inspire you through the insights of some of the smartest testers I've had the privilege to interview over nine years on my Test Guild podcasts.

I aim for you to glean an actionable tip, tool, best practice, or mindset every business day that you can apply to your daily software testing and career. Drawing from over 600 interviews conducted across nine years, I've distilled bite-sized, actionable daily advice for your benefit.

Get your copy now.

As always, test everything and keep the good.

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