AI, Self-Healing Clouds & Performance Breakthroughs! 🔮TGNS80

Have you seen this mind blowing Self Healing Test Execution Cloud Solution? What is up with so many companies adding performance testing to their automation solutions? And what are some new AI based features in automation testing? Find out in this episode of the Automation and DevSecOps news show for the week of May 7th. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and let's do this. This episode of the Test Guild News show is sponsored by the awesome folks at applitools. Are you looking to take your automation projects to the next level? We look no further than applitools and the visual AI Validation testing. Trust me, it is a game changer. Plus you could try it out for yourself free by creating an account with the special link I have down below. So as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, I think you really need to see this new solution by applitools. It's a self healing test execution cloud and if you haven't seen it or heard it yet, I have a great resource for you to actually get up to speed quickly optimize on what it could do for you. So this webinar will actually go over an introduction to the world's first self healing tests Execution Cloud and it's going to be presented by Adam Carmi, one of the founders of applitools, and he's going to go over why self healing is such a highly effective technology that substantially reduces the overhead of maintaining UI based automated tests by allowing UI elements such as buttons, links, labels and input fields be successfully located and interact with even following UI changes that would otherwise cause these tests to break. And until today you probably know self healing technology has only been available through commercial test automation tools that require teams to abandon their existing test suites and rewrite them from scratch using some type of proprietary test language specific to a test tool. Not only does this require substantial time and effort to accomplish, but it also creates an unwanted vendor lock in as they rewrite test suites that can only be executed by the specific vendor. And that's why aplitool Solution really is head and shoulders above a lot of these other ones. They released the world's first self healing test infrastructure where teams can now enjoy all the benefits of the best in class self healing technology just by executing their existing tests on applitools cloud infrastructure without changing even a single line of test code. And it's once again one of those things you need to see to believe. I highly recommend you register for this webinar because you're going to learn why what is self healing and why it's so useful, so definitely check this out and you can find it in the first link down below. Hope to see you there. Another solution I came across while I was researching this new show is around OpenAI for DevOps. So in this post they announced a new release of AI Companion, which is a generative AI copilot that streamlines uses stories and reduces human errors. And they say this program has already saved 25 million development hours annually and and reduces app failures by 78%. AI Companion can help you generate user story suggestions so you don't have to start from scratch, can enrich user story requirements and it can gather test case suggestions without having to write them. So definitely some cool innovation with AI within DevOps. I haven't tried it yet myself, but give it a try and let me know your thoughts in the comments down below. PowerSoft announced the latest release of its AI powered AAPI testing solution and the outlook goes over to point zero with enhancements to measure and analyze software code coverage. DevOps teams can expect fast, efficient and accurate verification workflows with a software testing platform that leverages artificial intelligence, so has capabilities like simplifying workflows and unified reports for code coverage. So QA testers can measure code coverage without needing to access the actual source code and can collect a report of code coverage for distributed microservices and end to end test case scenarios. You can create audit trails for modified test files and virtual assets and has a file based correlation of requests and responses for virtual services. So definitely check that out and let me know your thoughts as well. Next up, we have a Follow the Money segment and this announcement is how OpenLayer announces 4.8 million seed round funding. If you don't know, Open Layer is an AI testing platform and it helps companies validate their machine learning models and diagnose errors and was founded actually by a former Apple ML engineer and Open Layer aims to make test driven development a crucial part of the ML process. The funding will enable expansion and creation of more sophisticated guardrails that show robust and fair model behaviors. And this is a great segue on an article I just found by Jason Arbin, CEO of Test AI, which is all about why AI needs testing. This article emphasizes the importance of rigorous testing for AI to ensure its development aligns with humanity's best interest. And with the rapid advancement in AI which we've seen already in some of these announcements so far, proper testing is crucial for maintaining control and allowing AI to potentially surpass human intelligence. In the article goes on to talk about how AI bots can have a transformative impact on society and as they can outperform humans in certain tasks and provide their services universally at a lower cost and faster speed. But this is a big but because it's the main gist of the article is how human testers may be the last one standing in the software engineering profession working alongside AI to ensure optimal performance and functionality. As always, thank you Jason for a very thoughtful piece on AI and testing and what testers really need to know about the impact of AI in the software testing profession. So besides a bunch of AI news articles, I also found a bunch around performance testing. So I don't know how I missed this last time, but this was released a few weeks ago on a cool way that you can use Playwright and this is from Marcus who talks about his team has recently open sourced a demo repository demonstrating the power of Playwright, a Azure Load testing and Chaos Studio, all running seamlessly with GitHub Actions. And the team really is encouraging contributions from the community to enhance the project further. They have a Cantos Trader app, a sample application that highlights the capabilities of Playwright, Azure Load Testing and Azure Chaos Studio and other innovative cloud testing tools. And this repository includes source code deployment templates and demo scripts, making it an invaluable resource for those looking for to explore and experiment with these cutting edge testing tools. So don't miss your opportunity to contribute and learn from this awesome project. And another tool that introduced performance functionality this week is Mable. So Dan just posted How Mable, if you don't know, is a SaaS offering for low code. Intelligent test automation just announced a new load testing feature that allows engineering teams to access the application's performance under production load easily and and this ability is seamlessly integrated into Maple SaaS platform, which enables users to get more value from their existing functional test, shifting performance testing earlier in the development lifecycle and reducing infrastructure and operational cost. Edan also points to a study that shows that application performance has a significant impact on user satisfaction and mere 1 second delay in page load time can hurt conversions by up to 7%. However, only 6% of development teams are fully satisfied with their performance testing capabilities. And now with Maple's new API load testing capabilities, teams can really unify functional and non functional tests and import things like postman collections for faster test creation. And this approach can significantly lower the barrier to sustainable collaborative performance testing practices even for teams without dedicated performance testers or tools, which I've seen is a big bottleneck for a lot of companies. I get a lot of people pointing me to this announcement, but Axio was the first one that actually sent me this link in LinkedIn to this announcement by Postman and it's an announcement for early access release for API performance testing and it talks about how API performance testing is essential to providing a great user experience, ensuring the APIs can handle the expected load and response effectively to changes on demand. So this new feature is going to allow you to measure API response times, throughput and error rates under simulated loads, enabling you to optimize and improve API performance for better user experience, identify bottlenecks, latency and failures, and determine the scalability of your system. And this release focuses on load testing which aims to observe and benchmark the performance of your APIs under expected real world conditions. And with Postman's Early Access API performance testing, you can assure your APIs meet functional and performance expectations, giving you users the best experience possible. So you can request early access now and stay ahead of the competition by delivering reliable and higher performance APIs. And this last article is about a new observability plugin for JMeter and this plugin allows users to monitor the command line interface or non GUI performance tests with their favorite browser. Using Prometheus. And the enhanced capabilities of the plugin aim to address some of the limitations of JMeter's GUI mode, which can consume significant CPU and memory resources affecting test results. And this plugin also offers an endpoint in the Open Metrics format, exposing these KPIs and making them available to products like Prometheus. And with this new release, JMETER users can now enjoy more effective analysis and monitoring capabilities without compromising their test results. And for links of everything value we covered in this news episode, head over to 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. My mission is help you succeed at creating end to end full stack pipeline automation awesomeness. As always, test started and keep the good cheers.