Automation Testing Trends for 2022

Welcome to the Test Guild Automation Podcast where we all get together to learn more about automation and software testing with your host, Joe Calantonio.

Hey, it's Joe.

And welcome to another episode of the.

Test Guild Automation Podcast. Happy New Year. As always on this show for the past I don't know, since the show's been running seven years I guess it's been. It's crazy. So thank you everyone for your support. Before I get into it, but every year I like to give my top Automation trends for the new year. So here is a recording of a webinar I did recently on my Top automation trends for 2022 and if you really want to upskill your automation testing efforts and advance your career in the new year, there's no better way than joining us at our annual Automation Guild online conference. Our sixth annual event will take place this Febr 7th till the 11th. We've been doing this since 2017. It's something we highly believe in. It's our premium online event that we do that was way before COVID 19 and we have a bunch of loyal automation guilders that join us every year. So it's a really active community as well. And our goal at every Guild Conference is you discover actionable automation tip, tool technique or best practice, or even a mindset that's going to help accelerate either a new or existing automation efforts and also help you advance your career in the new year. If you haven't already, definitely check it out. Register now, head on over to automationguild.com and register today. And I know I don't want to keep pushing it, but if you don't know, a lot of companies actually also have education budgets so you can probably get your ticket paid for. A lot of Guild members actually have that and I'll have a link in the show notes here actually that can give you a template you can use to ask your manager to actually pay for your ticket at the shares eventually.

The Test Guild Automation Podcast is sponsored by the fantastic folks at Source Labs, the cloud based test platform that helps ensure you can develop with confidence at every step from code to deployment. For Every framework, browser, OS, mobile device and API get a free trial. Visit testguild.com sourcelabs and click on the Exclusive Sponsor section to try it for free today. Check it out.

This is automation trends for 2022. I just want to give a shout out to it's really not me, it's really I've interviewed over 400 people on my podcast from all these interviews. I've also hosted a Bunch of applitools events. So all those awesome speakers they've had, I've gleaned from them as well. I try to give credit whenever I can in these slides to where I got the idea from, but it's basically anything I've heard and if I heard a lot of it, I just put it together and I treat it as a trend and I do a little research. All right, so obviously the biggest trend, I think, and I think everyone would agree, is I think Covid really has changed software development. I think that a lot of things that happened, I hate the term digital transformation, but a lot of people I speak with always say, oh, my company was forced to go online and accelerate that digital transformation. I think actually Covid has accelerated this. And because of this, I think a lot of the trends that we'll be seeing actually tie back to cloud based technologies and the challenges that they bring up for testing in general. So trends, the cloud growth due to Covid, obviously more people using cloud, more people are switching their technology from in house to a cloud based solution. A lot of them are consuming. It's not like back in the day when I started where everything was in house and you developed everything from scratch. Nowadays you take libraries, open source libraries, a lot of times now these libraries are built in the cloud. So you're actually consuming third party services in the cloud cloud. And so that's a trend. And because that's a trend, I'm going to show you some tools and techniques I think become more popular because of that. And you may have to change your thinking about certain types of techniques you might use for these type of technologies. So the first trend is cloud growth. And here's actually Parasar I met at Future of Testing Applitools and he brought up a good point that he's actually seen this as well. So it's just not me making this up, but this is just an example of someone telling me that they've seen the cloud coming in more important in their operations that they've worked with. And I'm going to share some things he's helped share with me about infrastructure and how to test infrastructure as well. But this is a quote I get heard a lot of on my podcast, interviewing people about how the cloud really has become more and more important to them. If you do a little research though, it's not only opinions, it's also, I think I got this from pwc.com they said cloud spending rose from 37% to 29 billion in 2020. And they just see it rising in 2022, I think also somewhere where another survey where it said sea level leaders in the United states actually saw 53% of companies have yet really to invest in cloud technology, even though it's on their roadmap. So if companies haven't moved to the cloud, they're going to. And I think it's a big opportunity in the space right now. So what does that mean? I think what it means is a lot of people have been talking about API testing the past few years. I think it's only going to accelerate.

API microservices type testing. If you're not doing API type testing or you're not familiar with the terminology or how to test it, I think it's a good time to get more involved in it. Here's another report by Market Watch. They predict that in 2020, I think it's going to be 1.5 billion. By 2026, right now it's 744 million. The way companies are investing in it is only going to increase. So anytime I see money or companies investing in things, it's like a flag to me. Hey, this is something I probably should pay att, because normally companies don't invest money into things that they don't see happening in the field themselves or with their clients or customers. So anytime I see this, I see this as an opportunity for testers as well and that we should pay attention to. So here's a big one that came out recently and that's with Postman, just got a C round funding and I think that worth 5.6 billion. And so Postman has been around for a little bit, but obviously companies are investing in them. And so if they're investing in this company, they're probably invested in other companies because they see that based on their research as well, that they see API and microservices being a growing trend with developers and testers. And Postman is one of the most popular tools I've heard on my podcast from testers that I've been doing API testing. I think that's just a clear signal that we are going into an API first type world. So obviously UI is still important, but I think a lot of these technologies, especially people I speak with on my podcast, usually utilize microservices now. And so the UIs are usually just calling business functions that live in the APIs the microservices. So there's a lot of coverage that needs to be taking place at the API level beyond the UI that I think a lot of people are missing. Opportunities on. And I think it's a good time to get involved in it, like I said, because it's obviously companies are investing money and it's a growing trend with more companies investing in cloud services, cloud becoming more and more critical. Obviously I think how do you test in a distributed cloud system? And I think this is going to bring up certain tools and techniques that I be, I think more popular in 2022. So the first one is I interviewed Sergey a few months ago and he told me about Test Container. I actually didn't know about Test Container before. It's a library that basically uses Docker containers within your test and you're able to provide external dependencies and a distributed cloud architecture like databases, streams, you could throw up selenium instances, AWS mocks, anything you can dockerize, you can contain it now within your test. And so what's cool about this is a lot of times when using cloud services you have dependencies, right? And you really can't test those external dependencies without mocking them or really playing around with the system. But technologies like this Test container can allow you now to really create a self contained test environment that really mimics real world conditions rather than wait till you get to production. A lot of times we don't find these issues until we go into production. But using technologies now that they can become more and more popular in 2022, you stop mimicking things like this Also will tie into another trend I see later on with Chaos Engineering. What happens when a service provider you rely on an external dependency goes down. Is your system able to handle going over to another system while using something like Test? You could test that out, you could test out redundancies and things like that. So I think it's a really cool solution. They have libraries in both Java, Python, Go, I think Scala. So I think it's a really cool library. I'm going to stop playing around with it and I've signed here a few people actually referencing it as well. So I think if you don't know about it, I think it's a good, good library to get involved in.

So I actually recorded this webinar in September and after that in November and December, AWS went down at least three to four times. And a lot of services that relied on AWS also went down. So companies like Twitch, Hulu and a bunch of others also went down. And so I think this is a growing area where we need to think about redundancy. When a system goes down, can we fail over? And I think these types of tools can help us actually test those type of scenarios. And that's why it's so critical to learn about this, because it's going to become even more and more common in 2022 and beyond to have these types of disruptions and how do our applications handle those disruptions.

And that's one of the reasons why.

I actually asked the folks from Test Container to join us at the Shares Automation Guild to give a session on it so you can get a hands on view on how it actually can help you in your day to day automation activities.

Another one I just found out about is Local Stack and as I mentioned, because people now rely on services in the cloud, this allows you to spin up a test environment on your local machine and provides the same exact functionality in APIs that you would in a real world AWS cloud environment. So you can run all your lambda functions, you can store data.

In different tables, you can do feed events, you could put the application behind an API gateway, you can do a bunch of different things with this. So all this happens locally on your machine so you don't have to rely on an actual cloud instance to do the testing. You could test it locally. So the reason why I just bring up these tools I think like I said, I'm a big believer in tooling and technique and I think these type of toolings I think we'll see more and more of in 2022 and here's some that I think you should maybe get your head around because I think you may be using them in the future going forward. Could be wrong, but that's just my thought there so far. Another big thing I was surprised about. As I mentioned I've been hosting a lot of events for applitools Future of Testing. I'm just shocked by the amount of people that bring up. I know people hate this term non functional testing but I'm not going to get into philosophy but I think a lot of people know what it means at least whether or not they agree with the term. I've heard a lot of sessions on accessibility testing at Future of Testing. A lot of companies actually have on their definition of done security testing, performance testing and these from random people that have been talking on these events by applitools and they all say the same thing. So accessibility testing has been huge and I think the reason why is because as we go cloud native and we get on mobile devices I'll talk about later UI experiences is really critical and that people are focusing more on the user experience as well and part of user experience is accessibility testing. But a lot of these things we used to push off at the end was performance testing and security testing. So I think it's gonna be a growing trend with non functional testing. Once again, someone I spoke to at Future of Testing, I didn't know Angie was gonna be here. So it's not a plug for applitools, but it just happens to be that I've heard a lot of people talking about it. So Gamma actually had a kind of a controversial session where he said traditional testing jobs he sees in his organization going away. And what his executives talk about is how we can get more people involved in testing, not necessarily testers. And what you have tests do, they say you can add value as a tester to show that you can add value. And I think testers bring a lot of value. The problem is I don't think a lot of times they promote themselves or say, hey, I know this is not functional testing, but I'm a tester. I know the skills needed to really drive this initiative. Even though I may not be a performance tester or a security tester, I know how to get the team involved in testing scenarios and quality initiatives and that we become more and more leaders that help drive us. And I think the more you get your hands a little dirty with security, performance testing, accessibility testing, you can help tell the teams, hey, I may not be an expert here, but hey, you developer, Here are some tools you can use as you're developing to help you with performance testing. And as part of our definition of done, I'll be looking over this and helping drive, you know, this all the way through the pipeline. Not just functional automation, but quality all the way throughout any type of testing activity. And I think non functional testing is a big, big win for testers in general if you're not doing any type of other testing other than UI automation. And so another thing that you know when I bring up non functional testing is I know this is cheesy, but I kind of like cheesy things. So I do my money graphic here and that is follow the money. I don't know if you've been watching, but it's been crazy. I don't know why I watch acquisitions. I get kind of excited about companies acquiring other companies. And the reason why is they're spending money and usually they don't spend money on things that they don't see something with value or something they're hearing their customers talk about. So when I talk about non functional testing, his Tricentis, they keep Acquiring companies but they've mostly been known as I would think a UI based functional type of company. But they acquired new. I never get this name right, Niotis, which is a performance solution. And so that's one, one red flag that happened a few months ago. Another one is I thought was weird is Grafana, which is an observability platform. Acquired Key6 which is a performance testing solution which I thought was kind of odd. And then another one was Source Labs. I went to Sauce Labs at one of my sponsors and the homepage they have like seven different verticals now that they test in. So it's full pipeline and a lot of it's non functional. And one of them is Backtrace which is, I thought it was mostly unity game monitoring, but there's all types of monitoring. So a lot of these, like I said, a non functional testing. So what are these traditionally I think testing focus companies doing now with these other types of testing to me it's just, just, it's just like a beacon saying hey, something's going on here. I better pay attention to what are they hearing or what are their customers telling them because I think anytime kind of being selfish here is you want to help your current company be current, but also you want to be current because if a company ever lays you off or you want to switch gigs, you always have the latest skills that can help you transfer it to another position. Not that so you're helping your company you're working in now, but you're also helping your future employment. And just looking at these trends, getting more familiar with non functional testing I think is going to help.

And that's why at the Automation Guild the last two days of the event is a five day event. The Thursday and Friday we have all sessions dedicated to non functional automation topics like performance testing, security testing, chaos engineering and much more. So definitely check that out. Head on over to automationguild.com register today.

So another kind of trend I thought was kind of interesting is the death of the test Pyramid. A lot of people, once again, Test Pyramid is kind of overblown. Even the creator of the testing pyramid said hey, it's just a rule of thumb, people have been going overboard with it. But anyway, I had a really kind of odd conversation with Goiko on my podcast and he seen that the cloud, it's a very, very rare to see an application that's built in isolation, right? Everything like I said now utilizes services all over the Internet. So you start depending on a lot of changes that other companies might do that you're not even involved in. He gave an example of one of his applications used a third party service that went down and he didn't even know because the code doesn't even really touch it often, but went down. They had big issues because even if they had all tests at the unit level, the integration test level, they would never have caught this issue because it actually relied on a third party service that kind of influenced their application in a way that they weren't aware of. This is one reason why chaos engineering is becoming more important. But he said the testing pyramid was great when you knew how everything was when it was under your control. But now because we're going cloud, native and API first type world, major components of risk happen after deployment, not before deployment. Influences that are outside your control from people working on a specific piece of software now. So in order to de risk things become more effective. He thinks that testing in small isolated units of code and focusing on the speed of isolating testing doesn't really help bring as many benefits as it used to as the test pyramid kind of tries to highlight. And so visual testing, I think it kind of replaces a lot of these activities in the test pyramid. He calls it approval testing, visual approval testing. And so he actually created this open source tool called Appraise, which is a visual approval tool. To me it's visual validation testing.

Which I think originated from my opinion in 2015 with Applitools. And he says this tool really helps you to be able to check web pages, visual layouts, browser components, do all types of different testing that you wouldn't catch at the unit level or integration testing level. And that using a visual type of approach really can catch issues that you wouldn't be able to catch in any other way. And he says it's going to help also AWS Lambda functions in the future as well. And this is a model I really looked forward to or I think done really well with applitools. It's both people and machines working together to do testing where it's not just the machine telling you something or it's actually highlighting things from the machine perspective and, and having a human go in and say, hey, is this really a bug? Is it not a bug? Do I see the difference? Yes, this was right, yes, this was wrong. But using the leveraging the tool to do all the kind of the grunt work to bubble up type of insights that it can give you to find issues that you wouldn't be able to find, probably using a traditional approach like we mentioned with the test pyramid type of approach. Here's another thing I thought was interesting, just a different point of view. Anytime you change your point of view, it kind of changes your perspective on looking at things that you may have done over and over again. And that is. I was talking to a consultant at Accenture and I don't want to give him the name of the person because I didn't get his permission to say it. But he said that their company, they don't even use the term software development lifecycle anymore. They just call it a funnel or a pipeline. I think the reason for that is as we go cloud native and we're trying to accelerate the speed in which we deliver software. So two week sprints are normal for continuous integration, continuous delivery. He said even a lot of his clients did two hours of sprints. So they're constantly getting new requirements and then they have to filter out defects. So at the end, the bottom of the funnel is higher quality systems that goes into production on a continual basis. So every two hours or every day or whenever the Sprint cycle is, they're doing automated testing, massive amounts of automated testing of the new code. Because everything's constantly changing and because everything's constantly changing, it's no longer really a traditional life cycle. I know a lot of people used to have test plans and that's cool. A lot of people should still have test plans or at least think about it. But we went from this waterfall from when I started to two hour delivery is insane. And so rather than having a software development lifecycle all the way through, it's more like a pipeline of funnel testing. I just think that's kind of, kind of interesting. Now here's something I think a lot of people are going to roll their eyes at or say, ha, ha, that's, that's, that's not true. But I really, I've been hit up by so many companies since I've gone solo by, hey, check out our, check out our tool. Check out our tool. And 9 out of 10 times every time I check out their tool, it is a codeless type of AI based, low code solution. And you know, I'll give a credit, I think a lot of them have gotten a lot better. You know, when I started we had Windrunner and Record and Playback and that was a nightmare. A lot of these do actually use legitimate machine learning algorithms that can kind of help make these solutions better. But I think a lot of reasons why this is becoming more popular and become more of a trend is as we try to ship software quicker and faster into the Field into the hands of our customer. We need to do more kinds of testing and obviously you need to do exploratory testing and these other things that you can't get from automated tools. But you want to get more people involved and the best way to get more people involved is to use a solution that's easier to use, that doesn't necessarily require a full blown developer to help with. Obviously you can have that level of coverage from a developer, but you can also have other people contribute with these other low code type of solutions. So low code is something I've definitely been seeing more of, just something as a big trend definitely that I see happening for sure. So what skills and programming languages should you use in 2022? So this is just one of the sites I always look at for popular languages and Python on a few of them has been number one and then number two has been Java. So you can't go wrong learning either one of them. Obviously if you learn one syntax, as I get older, it's you learn that one syntax is basically the same compared language to language, just slightly different. So if you understand the concepts, going from language to language isn't as hard as you would think. So if someone's struggling with oh, what language should I use? I would just say pick anything and then go with it. But I find Python to be especially relevant because a lot of companies I speak with, a lot of testers, they use Python because Python has a lot of libraries for AI, machine learning, all the types of things that are really in fashion right now. So a lot of you are saying, well, big deal. And so what I did, I said, okay, how does this relate to automation testing or writing testing code? So I went to the top 20 companies in Silicon Valley and I just went to their job requirements and skills and I copy and pasted them into a huge word cloud and I just did generate, as you can see, the what pops out is Java and Python, which is rightly exactly in line. What I've been seeing with these other polls from developers of what the most popular languages are. So Definitely Python, Java, JavaScript can't go wrong. But I think there's also other things in here that kind of pop up that I thought was interesting. So git, web services, APIs. So if you're looking for skills to focus in on one hack, I always do is I always go because I used to be paranoid as I was working because I always thought I was getting laid off. Eventually I did get laid off, but rather than finding a new job, I just went working for myself. But I always wanted to know what skills should I be working on just in case. And this is just one way to make sure that, hey, am I up to date? Am I staying up to date? Am I helping my company stay up to date? So it's not being selfish, just thinking, oh, I'm going to get my next gig with these new skills. It's also, hey, can I help my current job with the newest skills and the newest techniques. So this is something I do every year or every six months is just look at random job postings and just see what they're looking for. Once again, Source Labs. I think they've acquired four different companies this year. They did one API Fortress in December of 2020 as well, but this one's a, I came to say Automata iq. It's a codeless technology. So why is Sauce Labs contributing to it? Well, I just think once again, they probably talk to a lot of customers and because they do basically pipeline automation, they want to have a solution that they can have their customers use to do quicker automation. Like I said, I don't think it's going to replace everything. I think it's a place for everything. And you may have some people in your organization that may really thrive codeless, you may have others that thrive with non co licit. I would always do a proof of concept to just see whatever works for your company to give it a try for sure. All right, so you've been hearable mobile testing forever for forever, probably. No doubt. But I think definitely because of COVID everything has been going online. And what do you see when things go online? A lot of restaurants around me, I'm in the middle of Nowhere, town of 200 and even around my surrounding town, there's companies online. That hole in the walls and you're like, what? And I think it has to do with COVID because they couldn't have people in house and how are people ordering food and things like that? They're using their cell phones. So obviously I think this is going to be a trend that's not going away. Even if people go back on site, the margins of being online are way better anyway. So I think a lot of companies are going to keep both models, a hybrid model and you keep hearing a 5G. I think 5G when it comes is definitely going to accelerate this even more. So due to Covid, many companies have pivoted to digital. And so really mobile apps are not just increasing in numbers, but also in terms of influence in people's day to Day lives and just a cool graphic I got how this applies in all the different industries and where people are using mobile devices. So again Sauce Labs, quite a company called TestFury this year and this is in the mobile space. I think they got a round of funding but regardless of why they're doing it, I think once again companies investing money keep. I sound like a broken record but to me it's just a flag of what you should be probably spending time on as well being aware of. So another trend to did mobile is I think user experience. And that's why I think I've been seeing more about accessibility testing on a lot of these happy tools events. So user experience is big. I don't know if you know Google actually rolled out a new how they rate websites. So because everyone's mobile first and everyone has a website where they do business that is critical because if you're not familiar with Google and how they measure sites, if your company does a lot of E commerce and they're being bumped down in the rankings of search engines because you don't have your core vitals in place, well you as a tester need to be aware of that. And I think that this core vital even affects my blog and affects everyone. So you need to be aware of context, loading, speed, interactivity, visual stability. They look actually at overlap. So things like visual validation can help you with. They will really throw a flag and derank your site in the search rankings if it doesn't meet a lot of the core vitals. So what does this mean? I think you as a tester or as testers in general can help let you developers know. Hey look, there's tools here built into your workflow that can help you really help think about the user experience as you're developing code and two free ones out of the box that everyone knows about if you don't know about. It's something your developers definitely should know about. That's Google's Lighthouse and it's a built in Chrome dev tools. It's used to emulate mobile devices that have smaller screens. You can actually slow down the cpu, test it with a slower network, all free within the browser and also a web page test. It's often called I heard a call as the Swiss knife of performance testing. So it uses real browsers, not just Chrome as Lighthouse does and you could test on real mobile devices as well. So all front end developers should be using at a minimum, at a minimum Google Lighthouse metrics that are available on the Google Chrome tools. As I mentioned about Non functional testing. I think performance testing is a critical piece as well because a lot of these modern UI tests, modern UI applications really built on really rich JavaScript type of technologies like React and Angular. And so it makes it really critical now from performance from a user client perspective. Back in my day it was just like put load on a server. I'm just throwing up an HTML page and if the server can handle a load then I know the page is going to render correctly. But you can't do that nowadays. Nowadays is that the user experience on that one client is a big deal. So what I used to do is I used to run a windrunner script and have loadrunner put a load and just try to do really janky kind of timings and windrunner. But now there's a lot of solutions out there that you can use to help you do performance testing without knowing the really intricate details of the protocol level. And so I see it as a growing trend and a lot of testers are probably getting more involved in so leveraging either your Selenium test. I know JMeter has some plugins you can use to leverage your Selenium test. There's open source solutions as well to help you with the browser based functional testing.

All right, once again I'm not bragging, but I did this presentation in September and So in November K6 actually announced that they introduced browser automation and end to end testing with K6. So I was spot on with this trend for sure. And this is done with an extension to K6 adding support for browser automation via the Chrome Dev Tools protocol cdp. And we actually will have Nicole Vanderhoeven talking all about this at this year's Automation Guild. So definitely check that out.

This is James Pulley of the Great Perf Bytes. I don't know if you follow perfbytes, but it's awesome. Awesome podcast performance testing related and he just mentioned on my podcast because of the client frameworks, it's really difficult to reproduce performance script transactions at a protocol level like we did back in the day. And so using a browser really does make sense in certain situations. To help you get that coverage. This is from another interview I did on protocol level based scripting can be really time consuming if you've ever done it. I actually started my career doing mostly performance testing. It's really, really hard to do win socket type scripting and doing a browser is much better. Not the browser is going to replace everything, but it's just another thing to have in your toolkit to be aware of. So definitely Check out browser based performance testing if you haven't already. I definitely see as a trend in 2022 and beyond. And one of the biggest trends I keep hearing about is site reliability engineering over and over again. I don't know. Pretty much every other person I speak to on a podcast is talking about site reliability engineering. I used to call it performance testing back in the day, but I think it's actually does a lot of other things. But it's just, I think it's a fancier, cooler term sre. And if you look this up, obviously Google invented sre, so obviously you would see a trend going up. So I don't know how helpful this graph is, but it just shows you search volume in Google for SRE has increased. So that's a good sign. This is from I don't know if anyone knows Steven, but he's really been a performance engineer for years. He's moved over to site reliability engineering. Just the reason why I bring up this tweet is a lot of people I spoke speak with on my podcast actually have moved from a performance testing role or a tester role and they moved over to cyber liability engineering. So if it's something you want to get into as a tester, you have these awesome skills that are transferable in all these other domains. So if this is something you have interest in, I just recommend that if it's a hot topic and there's a job opportunity and you're a tester, I would go for it because you definitely have the skills to fill up a lot of job opportunities that are out there now for this space. So along with site reliability engineering, observability is probably the term biggest term of 2021, 2022. I just said as another metric that separates people that are in the know, it's reliability engineering. So definitely something to be aware of. It was another survey where they, they surveyed that the companies and they they rated companies on elite performers and elite performers are the ones that had observability. Observability in place to help them with monitor their overall health. So observability I think is a trend you need to be aware of. Like I said as a tester it's really critical to know about actually I'm in a mastermind with other business owners that they don't do testing and this guy's like oh, I put in telemetry the other day and I got an alert when my application did something wrong automatically I was able to fix it in real time. Telemetry is going to Be huge.

Telemetry is the data in your system that generates that tells you your system's health. And so telemetry gets generated based on instrumentation which is code or tooling that gathers data in the system at real time. And this is. If you don't have this in place at your company, you need to get telemetry and observability in place. Like I said, this guy, nothing to do with testing, just was talking about some other thing he was working on said by the way and I said okay, use this slide. This is crazy how you actually use this for your normal day to day development and actually help you resolve an issue. So just something I thought, I think it's interesting. Telemetry, observability. This is Rebecca. She's been in the performance testing space for a while. I think she currently works with Splunk. She just talked about opentelemetry and opentelemetry is a standard that goes with. I think you need to be aware of it unifies the standards of how to instrument and collect and export telemetry data. And a lot of companies are embracing open telemetry. I just think it's critical to know in 2022 and beyond is SRE tech topics like observability and telemet. Leandro Melendez, he had a great quote on my podcast that every organization should be implementing observability and telemetry. That's become the cornerstone of a good continuous performance. Not to mention everything else performance gets a benefit. And just the reason why I'm sharing this, I think it's a trend you should know. Even though a lot of people may not see themselves as civil liability engineers, performance engineering testers. I see testers as leaders like one a step a notch above everything and that you should lead your organizations down anything tester related. So I mean maybe because what you are is what you see as the most important because I'm a tester, I see as testers is the most important in an organization. So I just think it's cool that you can bring this back to your companies and help lead the charge making better quality software for the world. And so this brings me to resilience testing. You probably heard it as chaos engineering. It's a chaos engineering is really cool because once again as we move to cloud native type applications, when consuming all these other services, if a service goes down, how does your application perform? How do you handle calls that come in based on issues that people are finding out in production? A big trend I've been hearing is when they get a something that happens in production, like a service goes down and then they fix it. They make it part of a testing, regression test. So if you don't have Chaos Engineering or.

Resilience testing as part of your test plan, I definitely think you should have it embedded because I think it's going to help you with a lot of things, especially with these unknown things. A lot of times you can deal with known knowns like how many people are going to hit the system in general, how your system handles multiple people logging in at the same time. But how do you know how to handle something that you don't know how it's going to react? Well, one way to do is awesome. It's Chaos Engineering. How does it, how's my application react? And my database goes down. Well, you can use a tool like test containers to help you with that. And you can use Chaos Engineering to do these, they call it experiments to see how does my application perform? Is it performant? Is it resilient to changes in the wild? Because as we go consuming all these other services, you don't have control anymore. So you need to be more resilient. You need to be able to be comfortable with these unknowns. And the way to do that is to become more familiar, I think, with resilience testing. Chaos Engineering. So I'm saying 2022 is my trend is going to be the year of resilience engineering or resilience testing. All right, we're winding down. So AI assistant automation. So you probably heard of GitHub Copilot. So if you haven't, it converts comments to code and so you create a comment describing the logic you want and let GitHub copilot assemble the code for you. So if you're using a new language or a framework or just learning GitHub copilot can help find your way. So if you want to learn how.

To code better, you can use this.

If you're a seasoned developer, you can use this to help save time. It actually can help you with bugs or actually unit testing as well. So another use of it is it's a feature. You can import a unit testing package and it automatically will suggest tests you can use to match your implementation code. So I mean, this is gold. If you developers say we don't do testing or they have a hard time doing testing, maybe you're not a unit testing expert. Unit testing, it can help you with unit testing. That's why I bring it up. So it's definitely something you should look into. I think this is only going to get better and better over time. So I think it's the right use of machine learning and AI. Like I said, you have someone actually looking at it. So it's just not the machine, just mindlessly doing it. It's giving you suggestions and you, as the user, use the developer, use the testers, say yes or no. So it's a, it's a great fit between people, humans and machine. So once you. I heard about one tool, I started hearing more and more of them. Another one is Diff Blue, does the same thing. It automatically can AI drive unit tests for you. Just pretty cool tech. And I think 2020, we're going to see more of this. Something to be aware of. And so applitools actually I saw this, I said, oh, I'm going to beat everyone to the punch and do a post on this. And bam. Applitools comes out with the post. And not only do they have a post, they have Cobie. We actually tried it out with the applitools eyes and I don't know, this isn't a good recording. It's a recording of a recording and there you go. It can automatically write the code for you. So I think that's pretty wild. And I think a lot of times when I start with automation, people like, I don't do automation. I, I do test and real testing. And then a lot of them didn't have jobs and now everyone's into automation and a lot of people look down now on, on AI and machine learning and all these things, but I think really you need to watch out. A lot of things I thought AI couldn't help with, people didn't think AI could help with. It's helped with so. Oh, it can never play chess. Oh, it could play chess. Dang. It can never drive a car. Oh, it could drive a car. Dang. So there's nothing really inherently special about testing or development as well, but I just think that used correctly, it can assist. So see it more as an assist rather than a replacement. I think that's the kind of mindset and goal you should have in 2022 and beyond.

All right, so those were my top trends for automation in 2022. I will actually have a more detailed blog post in the coming weeks that probably tightens this up a little bit more rather than me rambling, but hopefully you got a lot of value on it for links to everything value we actually covered in this episode though you can head on over to test guild.com a381 and while you're there, make sure to click on the Try for Free Today link under the Exclusive Sponsor section to learn about Sauce Labs awesome products and services. And as I kept mentioning and I'm going to say it one more time, if you haven't already, definitely head on over to Automation Guild. Register today for the premier online event dedicated 100% to helping you succeed with end to End Automation Testing Automation Guild. It's going to be awesome. Hope to see you there. All right, so that's it for this episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. I'm Joe.

My mission is to help you succeed.

With creating end to end full Stack Automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good.

Happy New Year.

Cheers.

Thanks for listening to the Test Guild Automation Podcast. Head on over to testguild.com for full show notes, amazing blog articles and online testing conferences. Don't forget to subscribe to the Guild to continue your testing journey.