AskUi, Automation Stack or Framework? TGNS50

What's an automation stack and how different is it from an automation framework? 20% of test data will be synthetically generated by 2025 and 900,000 misconfigured Kubernetes clusters may be vulnerable to data exposed cyber attacks. Find out these and all other end to end full pipeline DevOps automation testing, performance Testing, Security Testing Site reliability engineering in 10 minutes or less and this episode of the Test Skill new show for the week of July 10th. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and let's do this. This episode of the Test Skill new show is sponsored by some folks at applitools. Applitools is a next generation test automation platform that's 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 seeing is believing. So create your free account now by clicking in the link in the first comment 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. First up, Automation News so this first article comes your way via Daniel Knotted. He's a mobile testing author, a testing expert. I've been following him for a while. I've had him on my podcast a long time ago. So this is why this next article really caught my attention and had a link to something called Ask UI. It's on GitHub and he said it's a really great test automation platform, so I never heard of Ask ui, so I needed to investigate further. So it's a automation end to end framework that enables you to automate all possible UI commands by simulating real interactions, drag and drop, swipe commands, interactions and even color verifications that may be giving you a problem. I think it's cool about this particular framework is that it runs on all technologies, so it says it's able to automate all UI technologies, whether it's net, web, native, mobile, everything works. I haven't tried it myself. So another really intriguing new automation framework. Definitely check it out and let me know what you think. And thank you Daniel for posting it and for all your contributions to the testing community. So this next article is by Paul Grisaffi, another automation expert, and it's on why an automation stack and not a framework? Apparently this article was born out of a Twitter space Discussion Some discussions came up out of this Twitter space that Paul Grisaffi realized he covered in a previous conference session. He did. So he decided to document it here and he talks all about why you need to talk about a stack instead of a framework. Goes over what he means by some clarifications on actions and behaviors, some code examples. Paul Grzaffi is always dropping really insightful things around automation and testing. So if he posts a new blog post, I'm going to read it and you should read it as well. And you can check that out in the first comment down below. And thank you Paul for all you do for the community. Also, my fellow goomba know what I like about Playwright? I like that they always seem to be updating it. It seems like every two weeks are on every two week type of Sprint or something because always releasing a new version. And here's the latest coming your way once again via LinkedIn on a new release of Playwright. And this new release covers network replay, advanced routing, component test updates, some new web first assertions, and more. And what I also like about Playwright is they always do these rather than just release notes. They always do like this release video. So definitely worthwhile checking out. I think Playwright is starting to become one of the leading automation frameworks is the big three of Selenium, Cypress and Playwright. And I think Playwright's almost making that jump ahead of the other two, but that's just my opinion. But check this out. If you haven't tried Playwright yet, I think it's a good time to get on board as well. All right, so you've probably heard of rpa. A lot of times when you hear about it, it pertains to automation of business processes, but I always thought it's a good place for automation engineers to get involved as well. So this next article is all about the value of automation testing for enterprises with a specific reference to RPA. So this is by Corey Chambers, who works at UiPath, who's one of the leading RPA solutions out there. And so if you're trying to get started with rpa, a lot of times there may be a manual test process that you can't seem to automate. And using automation testing process in this area, leveraging RPA is a quick way to get some quick wins for you and your team. And the biggest key takeaway from this for me, which I didn't know about, was that you UiPath has actually created a UiPath test suite, a test focus product portfolio that's powered by the UiPath automation platform. So then after reading that, I went to uipath.com directly and then clicked on their solutions and noticed that they do have this try the test suite for free. So thank you Corey, and UiPath for thinking about automation testers and adding this feature to UiPath. One thing I've always found frustrating as an automation engineer is that so many teams spend way too much time trying to create custom solutions from scratch rather than use an existing one. And one of those areas I've seen a big time suck is creating test management, dashboarding, reporting systems and you have to maintain support all the in house infrastructure that goes with that. So I just noticed that the folks at Quemeta or QA Meta, the same company that actually created the very popular automation reporting tool Allure, just announced a new cloud hosting DevOps testing ready platform called Allure Test Ops. I think you need to know about and it just goes over a little bit of how testing and how testing is even more a bedrock now in modern software development and how test Ops is becoming more and more critical for folks that implement cicd. Also there's a link directly to Allure Test Ops and if you go there you notice it just goes over what it is. Include some live documentation is a central hub for all your tests, it allows you to see some key metrics and KPIs and it integrates pretty much with everything so you get security analysis, aggregation, configuration, performance integrations and a whole bunch more. And it's also one of the few companies that actually post the price on the page so you don't have to get into a crazy sales call with someone. And you notice that the cloud based SaaS is now available in beta. So definitely check this out by clicking on the link in the first comment down below and let me know what you think. Is testing native mobile apps driving you crazy? Well I have a great free resource from Andy Knight on how to simplify cross device testing for native mobile apps. So this webinar is going to go over how to recognize pain points in native mobile app development and testing, how to learn to use visual validation checks in your automation test, and how to run Automation Mobile and how to run Automation Mobile tests across multiple devices in the applitools native mobile grid. Have you seen the applitools Mobile native grid? It is crazy how fast it runs if you haven't seen it. Just that alone is worth the price of free admission for you to register for this event. So definitely check that out once again and I'll have a link for it in the comment down below. Next up, Performance and site reliability news k6 just released 0.39 so this particular release includes many bug fixes and minor enhancements like better cookie handling and CSV outputs, but also has some awesome features that come with native Prometheus remote write output, distributed tracing, and a whole other bunch of performance. Awesomeness of using K6 if you haven't used K6 yet, definitely check it out and definitely check out this new release also. All right. For some reason over the past few months I've been hearing more and more about synthetic data solutions, mostly around automation testing functional automation. But I came across this next article that actually covers applying synthetic data to performance testing. This is also a new tool I haven't heard of before. It's called Mostly AI and it covers how for tests such as load and performance tests, mostly AI's platform completely removes the need to use production data or manually create dummy data, which is what a majority of testers are still using now. Apart from some clear privacy issues that come with doing it this way, it's a massive time thief with a huge chunk of your average time spent writing test data, which no one wants to do. They want to get right to the performance tests. So you don't want to have to be creating anything manually, including test data, especially for performance data. And so using mostly AI helps you scale up your synthetic data creation. And it also had an interesting fact in here on how 20% of test data will be synthetically generated by 2025. So it's a perfect time for you to get on board the synthetic data train. It is a growing trend and I think it fills a huge void I've been seeing over my 25 plus years in this industry. Next up, security testing news. So as automation engineers testers, you probably deal a lot with container technology, especially kubernetes technology. So I just want to bring this to your attention that over 900,000 misconfigured Kubernetes clusters were found exposed. So I found this via Guillermo on LinkedIn. 65% of these servers are actually based in the US so if you are one of those folks in the US that use kubernetes, you definitely want to check this out. And it has a high risk because some of these responses gives potential attackers a tip that the cluster is functioning and that they could try additional attacks based on exploits and vulnerabilities. So for links of everything of value we covered in this news episode, head on over to the 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 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.