AI Test Data and Vulnerabilities TGNS35

Can you use AI to help you create synthetic test data for your automated test? What major performance tool vendor now supports full chaos engineering events? And did you hear about the latest security vulnerabilities found in GitHub that could impact millions? Find out the answers to these and all other end to end full pipeline DevOps automation testing, performance testing and security testing in this episode of the Test Guild News show for the week of March 20th. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and let's do this. But before we get into it, this episode of the Test Guild News show is sponsored by the awesome folks at applitools. Applitools is the next generation test automation platform powered by visual AI which helps you increase quality, accelerate delivery and reduce costs with what I think is the world's most intelligent test automation platform. But don't just take my word for it, seeing is believing. So create your free account now by clicking on the link in the comment down below. And while you're there, why not like leave a comment and subscribe to get alerted and subscribe every time I release a new episode. First up, Automation News so Game Dev Driver, the gaming industry's first out of the box automation testing solution, has just received 2 million in seed round funding. This news made me really happy for Shane Evans and all the folks at Game Driver IO. They've been a big supporter of Guild conferences for a while and Shane has done a lot for the community. So really excited to see that his innovation in the gaming automation testing space is being well now well received by venture capitalists. So that's awesome. And, and if you don't know, Game Driver IO is a automated testing solution for video games, VR, AR and other immersive experiences. And the folks that invested in Game Driver said that they were really excited to be part of a milestone advancement in addressing the numerous challenges facing testing processes in the game vertical. So I say it all the time. I know I sound like a broken record, but I always look for key indicators in the industry and as we see as time goes on I think more and more folks going to have to automate things. Not only just games, but VR, alternate reality, all those other types of applications. We're going to need tooling for it. Game Driver IO is one of the first that I've actually seen jump into the space. So really excited for this. If you haven't tried Game Driver IO I highly recommend you check it out and I'll have a link for this in the first comment down below. So I was also excited to see this next free resource I saw from Kent C. Dodds and the folks at applitools teaming up to come up with a webinar on building excellent user experiences with Remix. So Kent is really knowledgeable and he's usually up really ahead of the curve on a lot of frameworks and a lot of technologies. So I don't know much about Remix, but apparently it's a web framework that uses the web platform to enable you to build excellent user experiences. I've been hearing more about UX and the need for UX and he's going to be going over why modern web techniques lead to poor user experiences and how Remix scales down for simple solutions and up for complex solutions with a single mental model. So if you do anything with UX testing or you want to know more about Remix, I highly recommend you check out this webinar and I'll have a link for it in the first comment down below. So we talk about AI all the time on the show, but this next news item was I think is a really good implementation of using machine learning and AI, and that's to help create synthetic test data for your automated tests. So this article goes into detail on how artificially generated data can be used in place of real historic data to train AI models when actual data sets are lacking in quality, volume or variance. What I thought was really cool is one of the synthetic test use cases that they recommend using this for, which are many, was specifically for software testing and it goes over how using real data to test new software can create privacy and security problems and synthetic data that looks like real data but isn't allows software to be tested across the full gamut of use cases without pulling real data at risk. Next up, performance and site reliability news. So Loadrunner Professional 2022 has been released and has a cool new feature I was really excited to see in that main feature that they highlight in this particular release is all around Chaos Engineering and how they're actually going to be partnering with Gremlin for full support of Chaos Engineering events and how these can actually be added during your test design. Which is really cool and talks about how this new capability will allow Loader Runner Professional customers to take advantage of benefits like testing the resilience of your systems, finding faults before they hit production, introducing Chaos Engineering events in a controlled non production environment, being able to use the collective measurements in the LoadRunner analysis, and support for multiple scenarios. So if you're using loadrunner, you're probably really excited to hear this announcement as well. If you're not using LoadRunner Chaos engineering is definitely something I've been hearing a lot about last year, the year before. I think it's going to be even growing more and more as the years go on. So if you're not doing Chaos Engineering, definitely check out Gremlin and other solutions in this space as well because I think more vendors besides Loadrunner are going to get involved in Chaos Engineering as well. So it's good to know. Also, did you know you can actually do simple load testing using GitHub Actions? And this article actually shows how to use GitHub Actions to load test, benchmark and validate HTTP and GRPC services with servos level objectives. And that's a nice little example of how HTTP load testing with the Iterate GitHub action can be done. It also goes over benchmarking SLO validation, so really cool use of GitHub Actions. If using GitHub Actions and you haven't done any type of load testing before, this is probably a good way maybe just to get acquainted. What is load testing? Try some simple examples before you actually scale up into more enterprise type solutions. I also came across the 2020 state of SRE report. I think this is by Dynatrace that goes over some key findings in site reliability engineering that you should know about. The research reveals that 88% of SREs say that now more understanding of strategic importance of their role than there was three years ago that SREs currently dedicate the largest amount of their time to reducing mean time to Recovery. In that 99% of SREs encountered challenges when defining and creating SLOs to evaluate service levels for applications and infrastructure. So I highly recommend you check out this report to learn more about why SRE is so important nowadays, especially as you know, reliability experience and security have become critical success factors in a world where every second of downtime really leads to things like lost revenue, declining share prices and lasting reputation damage. So check that out in the link in the first comment down below. Next up, Security News and so our first security article goes over how Exploit Intelligence can be used to accelerate risk remediation. Just another use of AI and machine learning I've seen beyond just functional automation. So what I love about the news show I'm always finding news items. And based on the news items I find about new tools, this one is on Psy Cognito which I've never heard about before. And Psy Cognito announced that they now have Exploit Intelligence which offers an end to end solution that helps you prioritize which risk to remediate immediately before they are exploited by proactively discovering external assets, testing vulnerabilities and providing expert threat and risk based insight. Like I said, never heard of Psy Cognito. So when I clicked on it seems like a cool solution that is a SaaS platform that helps you to automate attack techniques to test and protect your organization. So just another form of testing I think everyone needs to be doing nowadays and using tools like this I think are going to become more and more essential. So definitely check it out in the link down below. And so I know a lot of people have been using Kubernetes more and more recently based on people I talked to on podcasts and so this next news article can definitely impact a lot of folks listening. So definitely check this out. This article talks about a newly discovered vulnerability in the Kubernetes Catena runtime engine. So this really just goes on to talk about the underscoring growing need to better protect Kubernetes environments from malicious actors. And it goes on to say how this allows malicious attackers to wiggle around safeguards and enable arbitrary kernel parameters on the host which result in what they can escape from the Kubernetes containers and actually eventually obtain root access on the host, being able to move anywhere in the cluster that they want to perform a variety of different actions including infiltrating data or deploying malware or ransomware. So just a real eye opening article that you definitely should read if you're doing anything with Kubernetes besides Kubernetes. Another vulnerability that I came across was actually found in the open source project on GitHub which could impact millions, and this actually was found on Friday. Researchers have discovered critical vulnerabilities in several popular open projects, each which can cause a supply chain attack through the continuous integration process. And they actually found this vulnerability in misconfigured GitHub action workflows which could impact millions of potential victims. And a lot of this was caused by workflows which were missing proper input sanitizing which could allow malicious actors to inject code into the builds through issues and comments as well as accessing privileged tokens. So if you're using GitHub Actions, definitely check out your workflows, make sure that you're not open to this exploit vulnerability as well. And for links to everything of value we covered in this episode, make sure to scroll down and check out that first comment down below where I embed timestamp and have all the links to everything we talked about in this particular episode and while you're there, make sure to click on that very first link on how to create a free account with applitools to discover how to take your automation testing to the next level by leveraging visual AI. So that's it for this episode of the Test Guild News Show. Once again, I'm Joe and 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.