AI, Test Dashboards and Threat Modeling TGNS21

What is the state of AI and quality engineering? How does the new Lighthouse API help you to measure performance and best practices throughout a user flow? And why is having a threat modeling skill critical to helping you break into cybersecurity testing? Find out the answers to these and all other end to end full pipeline DevOps automation, performance and Security testing in this episode of the Test Skill News show for the week of November 7th. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and let's do this. This episode of the Test Skill News show is sponsored by the awesome folks at applitools. Applitools is the next generation test autom platform powered by visual AI, which helps you to increase quality, accelerate delivery and reduce costs with the world's most intelligent test automation platform. But seeing is believing. So create your free account now and check it out for yourself by clicking on the link in the comments down below. And while you're there, why not like leave a comment and subscribe to get alerted every time I release a new episode. It really does help spread automation awesomeness to the masses. First up, Automation News. So I have an awesome resource for you on a comprehensive report that provides a detailed examination of the current state of artificial intelligence across many use cases in the field of quality engineering and centers around a key question how can AI make quality validation smarter? And this resource comes your way via applitools. It's a webinar and they also have a white paper that is going to take a deep dive into some key insights that you definitely should check out on AI across industry. Understanding how visual AI actually helps shorten the release cycle, how to leverage AI to scale test automation and release faster, and a whole other bunch of topics that you don't want to miss. So definitely check that out in the links down below. And besides leveraging AI to help you with your test automation creation and maintenance, there's some other habits that you should learn to help you create what they call healthy testing habits. And so this brings me to your next resource, Healthy Testing Habits, which is the latest blog post by Kristen Giacovone that dives into six key testing habits to help you and your team adapt test automation. So some really good insights around different practices you should have that really helps your team accelerate to have more reliable automation. The first one is check your overnight tests and fix any failures. The second habit is run unit and integration tests with every build. The third is setting up a regular security check 4 which I also love is running one load tests before releasing. 5. Ping your APIs at regular intervals and 6 is set up monitoring alerts to actually read all the awesomeness around each of these habits. Definitely check out that blog post and follow Kristen and I'll have a link to that once again in the links down below. Also, besides habits, there are a lot of automation tools out there and a lot of them promise you certain features and functionality and I always recommend teams try them out for themselves because your experience with one tool may be different than someone else's experience with the tool. And this brings us to our next resource by Michael Bolton, who's documenting his experience with multiple tools. He has a really extensive overview of exactly how he used the tool and his thoughts around his experience. So this particular one goes over Catalan Studio, but he also did one on Mable I believe a few months ago and as I mentioned, it's a very long blog post. Gives a summary what he did to set up the platform, his testing notes, the different tests he ran and his experience with different features and functionality of the tool, along with a bug summary of what he found to be what he considered bugs with this particular application. So definitely a deep dive on all these tools. But as I always recommend, you should try it out yourself and see what your experience is. Because a lot of times I try a tool and my experience is much different than someone else's. So this is a great review of someone else's experience that you should definitely check out. But also don't be afraid to try out tools for yourself and reach your own conclusion as well. So speaking of tools, if you use Appium, if you're looking for a way to easily debug them, I found a new solution for you on LinkedIn by Sedershan, a plugin he created to help you debug Appium using a dashboard plugin that you could find on the GitHub repo now. And this plugin provides a dashboard view similar to Browser stack where it presents the complete session details along with text logs, device logs, and a whole bunch of other awesomeness like video recordings of the session and a lot more. So if you're using Appium, definitely give it a try and let me know what you think. And speaking of dashboarding, another solution I found was also on LinkedIn. This was posted by Sergio on a new plugin that I never heard of before called Angles, which is an open source dashboard that provides you that allows you to use multiple frameworks and major programming languages. Still have one central location to see all the results. Seems like a really cool solution. Like I said, I've never seen this before. So thank you Sergio for posting this and goes over some of the features that are included like visual comparisons, setting up ignore boxes, automatic cleanups, test cases, test matrixes, and another hot topic I've been seeing the past year is an explosion in tools coming out that help support Salesforce. And one of these tools that's been around for a little bit now is Testim. But they just came up with a new announcement for their introduction to testim for Salesforce. And this article just goes over some of the benefits of how to automate Salesforce applications using the AI power tool like Testim and Testim actually went and they helped create features that help deliver new capabilities that handle prevalent Salesforce testing challenges. Next up, Performance and Site Reliability news. So only weeks away from Black Friday and is your team ready for this? There's some tools that actually can help you do some preliminary high level things to make sure that your application is able to handle an increase in workload and make sure your applications perform it before it's too late. One of those tools that a lot of teams use is Lighthouse. So this next article should be really helpful to taking your performance and user experience to the next level. So what's neat about the Lighthouse new API Flow API is you can use Puppeteer to use it to script page loads and trigger synthetic user interactions, and Lighthouse can then be invoked in multiple ways to capture key insights during those interactions. That means that performance can be measured during a page load and during interaction with the page. I think it's a must know tool for sure. It's free and every developer on your team should be using Lighthouse. Also I found another article by K6 on finding net memory leaks through Silk testing, which is a topic I haven't heard a lot about in recent years. So really glad to see this new Resource updated for 2021 and beyond by Carlos and he walks you through the basics of memory leaks in Net, what they are, how they occur, and why they matter. It also shows how possibly to use techniques and tools already at your disposal to do a particular kind of performance test called the SOAP Test. So really great resource there. Once again this will be in the link down below. Next up, Security Testing News so this next resource is by Vandana who is my one of my go to security resources. She posts a lot in this area. She's an expert so if you're not following her, definitely follow her and check out a lot of resources she's creating on YouTube and on the web. And this one is for folks that want to actually break into cybersecurity. One of the areas that they should know more about is threat modeling and as I mentioned she has a playlist of a bunch of other security topics you should know as well. So definitely a must watch resource and must know contact in the security space to stay up to speed to know what you need to do in order to get into the cyberspace. If you're looking to get into cyberspace or even to make sure that your chops are up to speed. If you're currently a newbie, maybe in the security space, definitely check that out. And this last news item is a Follow the Money article to me. Like I said, these are key indicators of where the market is going and that is anytime anyone invests money. And this is how oxeye has received 5.1 million in seed Financial round led by Morevc. What I think is really interesting about this particular application or platform was it was built for AppSec Dev and DevOps teams were designed to help teams tackle cloud native challenges like containers, APIs, microservices, clusters and other cloud based components. It's actually also a tool I've never heard of before, so I'm always looking to learn about new tools and technologies to try out to see how it can help my team with their testing efforts. So definitely give Oxeye a look and let me know what you think. And I think as I said over the past few news shows, you know we're hearing more about containerization, cloud native type challenges, APIs, microservices. So this is right on trend with what I've been seeing and we probably need tools to help us along this way as well as we're developing software with these newer technologies to make sure that not only are they functional, they perform it, but also make sure that they're secure. So definitely check out these type of technologies as well to help you and your teams accelerate with developing awesome applications that delight your customers. So those are all the news items for the week of November 7th. Definitely check them all out in the links down below and also make sure if you haven't already, to create your free account now with applitools to check out how visual validation testing could take your automation to the next level using the most intelligent automation platform I know of and that is applitools. So show them some love. Show the show some love by clicking on that link, giving it a try because I really think it's going to help you and your teams. Like it helped me, me and my teams back in the day when I was using this when I worked at a real job. And I forgot to mention on the last show that November marks my second year layoff anniversary. I was laid off two years ago, but I decided to do Test Guild full time. So I just want to give a big shout out of thanks to all the sponsors, all the folks that attend my Guild conferences, all my blog posts viewers, all my podcast listeners, anyone that's helped me throughout these past two years to help me keep the lights on on the Test Guild. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. And as always, Test Harrison and keep the good cheers.