AI Contract Testing, ReportPortal Playwright, Test Data and More TGNS159

How can you create contract tests using AI? Want to know how to integrate Report Portal with your Playwright project? And have you seen this open source library that uses AI to automate both mobile and web applications? Find out in this episode of the Test Skill New show the week of June 1st. So grab your favorite cup of coffee of tea and let's do this. All right, as you know, I'm always on the lookout for new tools and this first one came my way via LinkedIn. And this is how Cignadot has introduced AI Smart Test. It's a Kubernetes native solution designed to simplify contract testing by eliminating the need to manually define or maintain contracts. The tool enables developers and testers to run service level integration test and Kubernetes sandboxes using real dependencies rather than mocks or stubs which are common in traditional contract testing setups. So instead of requiring predefined contracts, Smart Tests analyzes real service interactions and automatically detects meaningful API changes. And this is awesome because this AI driven approach aims to provide developers and testers with earlier feedback on service capabilities while reducing the maintenance burden associated with traditional contract testing frameworks. And what's Also cool is SmartTest operates by running tests in isolated Kubernetes environments that simulates real world conditions without impacting production or staging systems. So this allows teams to validate service interactions quickly and and safely. And the solution is intended to support microservices based architectures where frequent updates across multiple teams can make compatibility a recurring concern. And you can start using Cignadot Smart Tests for free right now with onboarding resources available directly on their platform using the special link down below. Next up is Webinar of the Week. So tomorrow I'm going to be hosting a webinar with UBS all around the capabilities and limitations of artificial intelligence with test data management. As AI continues to integrate into various aspects of software development, its application and test data handling presents both opportunities and a lot of challenges, especially for testers. I'm going to be joined by two awesome experts, Christoph and Bastian who are going to go over how to explore how AI can automate the generation and manipulation of test data increase efficiency by reducing manual workloads. However, they also caution against potential shortcomings such as the risk of bias in AI generated data and the need for human oversight to ensure data quality and relevance. So we're going to go over things like reduction data versus AI generated data, augmentation, not replacement and smart integration for future proofing. I think this is a must attend webinar and once again you find the registration link down below. Hope to see you there. And even if you can't make it, make sure to register because I send the recordings of these webinars after the event is done and so make sure once again to register right now using that special link down below. This next tool I've been a big supporter of for years, so I'm really excited to hear this new announcement. And that's all about how Report Portal has just released version 25.1, which include a bunch of security and usability enhancements, and this was announced by dmitry on his LinkedIn profile. So some key updates include an upgrade to Spring Boot 3, which brings increased security and performance benefits. This release also features performance and stability improvements across the platform, as well as fixes for known CVEs and addressing potential security risks for testing environments. Users can also now add options for things like customized footer links within the portal, providing teams more flexibility with their branding. And it also has a bunch of UI and UX refinements that also include streamlining the overall user experience and speaking about Report Portal and why it's something you definitely should check out, here's a technical guide I just came across. Biomarker outlines a comprehensive method for integrating Report Portal into a Playwright testing project with deployments on an AWS EC2 instance in the Step by Step tutorial is designed to help testers gain persistent and centralized visibility into test executions through Report Portal's dashboard. The post begins by highlighting the limitations of Playwright's default reporting and justifies the addition of Report Portal Report enhanced results aggregation, Real time analysis and trend visualization. Omar also walks the readers through the installation process, the configuration of Report Portal services via Docker Compose and the setup of support components. And it also goes over how to connect your existing Playwright test framework to Report Portal using the App Report Portal Agent JS Playwright package and includes setting up necessary configuration files like Report Portal config JS and aligns the project settings with Report Portal's API expectations. And if you're using Playwright, here's a great opportunity to actually check a Report Portal using that link down below. So I just found out another open source tool and I found this on Alex's LinkedIn which is all about Aluminum, which is an open source AI powered test automation library which is just released version 0.11 and this latest update adds Appium support for iOS, making Illuminum one of the first or one of the few open source frameworks that that actually offers. The combination that uses AI to automate both mobile and web applications using an open source tool. The integration extends Illuminum's cross platform capabilities, allowing developers and testers to Write tests for iOS, Android via earlier support and web applications in a unified environment with AI assistance. And Aluminum is hosted on GitHub under the aluminum HQ organization and continues to build on its promise to reduce test maintenance through AI driven selectors and self healing mechanisms. And what's awesome is while there's a lot of commercial AI test tools dominating the market right now, Illumina presents a vendor neutral, community driven alternative. So if you're a tester looking for a free and flexible AI assistant framework, you now have an open source option for automating both web and iOS mobile applications. Definitely. Check it out and let me know your thoughts in the comments down below. All right, so I'm always looking for real world case studies on how people succeed with different types of automation practices. Here's one that came across my feed again, and this is how AWS shares an internal practice for ensuring system correctness at scale. And this was written by Mark and Akush, who are both engineers at Amazon Web Services, and details internal methods used to maintain system correctness across its vast infrastructure. And this piece outlines three primary techniques proactive static analysis, runtime verification, and automated testing of runtime and variance. And according to the AWS team, static code analysis is conducted early in the development cycle to catch errors before code reaches production, and this includes both manual inspection and automation tools tailored for AWS environments. And runtime verification supplements this by checking behaviors during execution, especially in distributed systems where interactions across services are complex and prone to subtle bugs. Additionally, AWS relies heavily on testing runtime invariants properties expected to always hold true during execution across its services to detect regression and misconfigurations in real time. And engineers emphasize that these techniques are used in combination, not in isolation, and highlights the importance of making correctness verification part of the everyday development and deployment process. The team also notes that while correctness remains a high priority, these practices are embedded into existing engineering workflow to avoid slowing down development. Last up is a big announcement in performance testing and it's all how Locus Cloud has introduced a free tier of its distributed load testing platform, making it accessible to teams without requiring upfront payment or credit card information. And this announcement, posted by Lars, who is the founder and CTO of Locus Cloud, highlights that the service is now available to all organizations, ranging from startups to large enterprises. And according to the article, the free tier allows users to initiate distributed load tests within minutes and access detailed performance reports. The goal, according to the announcement, is to remove common entry barriers to performance testing and encourage early adoption within development cycles. And the service integrates with their open source Locus tool, which offers a cloud hosted alternative that automates infrastructure setup for test execution at scale. I'm not sure if you know, but I have a popular article I've had for years on the top 15 load testing tools that update every year and and Locus is one of them that always gets a lot of attention. So here's just another reason why you should definitely check out Locus. And also check out my article if you haven't seen it yet. Check it out. Let me know your thoughts. All right. For links of everything of value we covered in this news episode, head on over to the links in that first comment down below. 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. I want to thank this week's sponsor Zap Test AI, an AI driven platform that can help you supercharge your automation efforts. It's really cool because their intelligent copilot generates optimized code snippets while their plan studio can help you effortlessly streamline your test case management. And what's even better is you can experience the power of AI in action with their risk free 6 month proof of concept featuring a dedicated ZAP expert at no upfront costs. Unlock unparalleled efficiency and ROI in a testing process. Don't wait. 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