AI-first Fail, MCP Appium Gestures, Playwright, K6, and more TGNS157

Do you know the latest MCP for gestures in Appium? What AI first company failed and started hiring people again. And have you heard of the Functional Page model for Playwright? If not, find out in this episode of the Test Guild News show for the week of May 11th. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and let's do this. Hey, before we get into the news, 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. Schedule a demo now and see how it can help you improve your test automation efforts using the link down below. All right, first up is all about Appium. So the Appium test distribution team, Srini and Sai have done it again and just introduced another MCP server for Appium called MCP Appium Gestures, aiming to streamline the automation of complex mobile interactions. And this tool supports a range of gestures including tap, swipe, scroll, pinch, zoom, long press, drag and drop, and double tap. By leveraging the W3C Action API, it provides ready to use code snippets from JavaScript, WebDriver IE and Java Appium Java client, along with comprehensive documentation to facilitate implementation. The MCP offers a standardized approach to implementing intricate mobile gestures and automated tests. A lot of people tell me they struggle with to help enhance consistency across different devices and platform. Definitely. If you do anything with Appium or mobile testing, this is a must read or a must check OMCP server and you can find it using the links down below. All right, this next article is all about Playwright. So in a recent article published by James Kipp and he introduces the Functional Page Object model as an alternative to the traditional Page Object model for organizing Playwright test automation. And he goes over how the Functional Page Object structures test modules into four distinct files, actions, locators, data and specifications. And this modular approach aims to enhance maintainability and scalability, particularly in a large or rapidly evolving project. So it goes into detail how this model offers a module framework for Playwright tests, separating concerns into discrete files and structures that can improve clarity and facilitate collaboration in extensive test suites. Is AI going to take your job well, not so fast. So here's a company Klarner, a Swedish fintech giant valued at 14.6 billion. It's actually walking back its aggressive push to replace human customer service agents with AI, and its CEO, Sebastian recently announced that the company is ending its hiring freeze and actively recruiting remote human agents. And it goes over how this decision follows a period where the company relied heavily just on an AI chatbot, which handled up to 75% of customer interactions more than 2.3 conversations across 35 languages. However, the bot primarily served as a routing mechanism, directing users to human agents for more complex issues. But Matt Heuser was on top of all this. While Kurna previously touted the AI rollout as a major success, Matt raised concerns about the lack of transparency and evidence behind those claims. In this January 2020 article, he Matt actually criticizes the company for offering anecdotal success stories while failing to provide verifiable data about improvements in customer satisfaction or chatbot autonomy. He argued that AI may have little more than an interactive menu dressed up as innovation, and questioned whether it actually improved the customer experience or simply reduced cost. And Klarner's return to human support comes after a 22% drop in its service workforce during the AI dominant year, signaling a shift back towards balancing automation empathy, which I think we're going to see eventually with a lot of these companies. Do you do a lot of Salesforce automation? If so, listen up. This recent LinkedIn article titled The 7 Ways that Salesforce Summer 25 Release Might Break your Automation test by the awesome Robin Gupta outlines critical changes in the upcoming Salesforce Summer 25 release that could disrupt existing automated test suites. In this article highlights seven specific updates. One of them is the List View Dropdown overhaul. He also mentions the Unified Dynamic related List Accessibility Zoom Adjustments, Lazy Loading, Lightning Console tabs, customized Age of Force panels, slds, CSS class changes, and mobile file priming changes that you all need to be aware of. Software testers should probably review and update their automated scripts to accommodate these upcoming changes. So definitely give Robin a follow and see how maybe testers can help you out as well with all your automation, especially against Salesforce applications. So this normally would be a follow the money segment, but it doesn't list anything about money. And this is how BrowserStack has just acquired Requestly, which is an open source tool for HTTP interception and API mocking to help strengthen its suite of developer productivity offerings. So the open source version currently has 3.4 stars on GitHub, so a lot of people are using it the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but I also noticed they also have a paid plan so Requestly, if you don't know, enables front end developers to intersect, modify and mock API requ requests directly within their browsers, helping to facilitate development and testing without reliance on back end systems. The Tool has over 200,000 users across more than 10,000 companies and maintains a 4.3 star rating on the Chrome Web Store. As far as I can tell, Requestly will continue to operate as an open source project with plans to expand its capabilities to support HTTP interception on Android emulators and iOS simulators. Are you interested in accessibility testing and AI? If so, here's another real world case study by Craig Abbott, who's a principal accessibility consultant who writes how DQ System has released Axe Assistant, which is a new desktop tool designed to help developers and testers identify accessibility issues during the development cycle. The assistant runs alongside applications, monitoring for accessibility violations in real time using rules from the Axe core engine, and it aims to offer developers feedback directly within their workflow, reducing context switching and promoting early remediation. Sounds good, right? But according to this article, initial testing of a tool reveals that while Axe Assistant works effectively on standard components and static interfaces, it struggles to detect accessibility issues in complex or dynamically generated interfaces. Also goes of how the Assistant does not currently support testing across multiple screen states or modal dialogues, which really limits its which really limits its usage for modern web development and dynamic content. And he dives deep into how well it worked for him on real case studies, with a breakdown of each of the use cases that he used as well. And he could read more about this using the link down below. All right, I'm always on the lookout for new tools, so I found this post on LinkedIn that caught my attention is from James Walker, who's been on my podcast in the past. I didn't know he just started another company called Atonify, aimed to address the challenges enterprises face in managing and utilizing vast amounts of data. This platform is designed to automate complex data workflows and enhance decision making capabilities using AI agents. And James also notes that many enterprises struggle with data management due to the overwhelming number of data sources handled by a small data team. Traditional tools and methods are insufficient for such scale, leading to underutilized data assets. So Atonify AI aims to streamline data operations by enabling AI agents to autonomously perform tasks such as data migration, governance and integration. So if you're a performance engineer, here's an announcement. If you're using K6, they just released version 1.0 with TypeScript support and stable APIs. This release introduces native TypeScript support allowing developers to write tests with type safety and approved IDE integration. Additionally, the end to end test summary has also been revamped to offer clearer insights the test results eating a more efficient analysis. So to Hear more about case 6, definitely check out also my latest podcast with Mark and Tom about making performance testing accessible for all using the new Case Studio as well. And once again you can find all these links down below. Next up is our Follow the Money segment of the week. Unblocked, which is a developer tool focused on conceptual code intelligence, has just secured 20 million in Series A funding. This platform aims to assist software teams in understanding the rationale behind code, not just its functionality. And Unblock integrates with tools like GitHub, Jira, Slack and Confluence to provide developers and testers with insights into their code base. And by consolidating information from various sources, it really helps teams navigate complex systems and maintain code effectively. All right, for links to everything of value we covered in this news episode, headed over to links in the comment below down below. So that's it for this episode of the Test Guild News Show. Once again, I'm Joe. My mission to help you succeed in creating end to end full stack pipeline automation awesomeness and as always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.