AutomationGuild Voting, Performance in SDLC, Playwright Updates and More TGNS138

Do you know that voting for Automation Guild 2025 sessions is now open? Want to know how you can elevate your performance and functional automation checks at each stage of your software development lifecycle? And what's new in the latest version of Playwright? Find out on this episode of the Test Guild News show for the week of October 13th. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and let's do this. Before we get into it, if you haven't already, please make sure to subscribe to our Test Guild new show newsletter that I'll have a link for down below to never miss a new another episode. All right, so I'm excited to announce that voting is now open for Automation Guild 2025. Every year we survey the previous Guild attendees for the top issues that they're struggling with and then we do a call for papers addressing these issues. And the last step is voting on these anonymous sessions to let me know which ones you're interested in Most for the 2025 event. This is a totally democratic process that we innovated for the past eight conferences and now is the time to have your voice heard. Head on over to Test Guild do forward slash vote and make sure to vote for all the sessions that you're interested in the most. Look forward to your feedback. And as you know, I'm a big advocate for performance testing, not just functional automation. So I'm excited to announce that we have a webinar coming up tomorrow, so make sure to register for this. If you miss it, make sure to register as well because you'll be able to get the replay which will help you discover how to elevate your performance and functional animation and unlock continuous testing. So for any organization striving to deliver a high quality digital experience, embracing automated, functional and performance testing is essential to capturing or catching bugs before users do. But here is the tricky part. Achieving this is easier said than done. You'll need the right team members, skill sets, tools, and a streamlined process that ties everything together. With all these key ingredients, you have a recipe for bottlenecks and project delays rather than a successful release. So what do you do? Well, join me for this webinar. I've asked automation experts from octoperf and Perform to share how you can embed automated quality and performance checks at every stage of your software development lifecycle. At this webinar, you're gonna discover best practices to simplify workflows along with demos and your questions and anything you're struggling with to help you really elevate automation in your cicd pipelines and scale your testing strategy. Register now using the link down below. Get even if you can't make it, you'll get the replay. Hope to see you there. All right, so this next post is from Michael, who caught my attention by letting me know that Playwright has released a new version. What's included? Well, let's take a deeper dive. So according to Michael in the release notes, here are some of the more notable updates. The first One is the WebSocket routing. So Playwright introduced two new methods, page route WebSocket and browser context route WebSocket, which enables users to intercept, modify and and mock WebSocket connections. And this allows testers more flexibility when working with real time applications, which is huge. There's also some user interface enhancements. I think the Playwright HTML report now has a copy button for annotations and test locations. There's some updates to the memory leak detection with a new page request GC method. They also have enhanced their API testing with an API request. Can now record detailed timings and security information through HAR files, providing deeper insights for testers and a bunch of browser version updates as well. So definitely something to check out for yourself. You can find the link down below. And as I mentioned earlier, I love combining performance and functional testing. So this next announcement is all about a recent development with SmartBear, who's upgraded its test complete platform to include integrating load testing capabilities. I love this enhancement. It aims to streamline the testing process by allowing users to conduct both functional and performance tests within the same environment. And obviously this is great because it's going to give you a lot more insight into how your application performs under different loads and ultimately hope boosts your software testing quality by leveraging both functional and performance testing at the same time. And that's another reason why you need to register for the webinar I mentioned earlier on how you can combine both functional and performance testing. All right, I know I mentioned Playwright earlier, but I know a lot of people tell me that they struggle still with web authentication with Playwright. So I was excited to find this article by Divya Rajan, who post about how he explores the application Playwright along with how it can handle web authentication. So Divya Rajan delves into the configurations required to set up basic authentication, where credentials are encoded and passed via headers and Digest Authentication, a slightly more complex method, evolving a series of challenges and responses. And by using Playwright, they can now effectively automate these authentication processes, simplifying the testing of web applications that require secure logins and this article goes into a bunch of detail on how that can be done. So if you need to do anything with Authentication with Playwright, you definitely should check out this article that you could find down below. Also want to learn more about AI's role in quality assurance? Well, I came across this article that talks about a new report from testrail that highlights the increasing significance of AI in quality assurance processes with software developers. And it talks about how the report was derived from extensive industry research showcasing how AI can be integrated into enhance efficiency, accuracy and overall quality in software testing. It also discusses several use cases where AI has successfully augmented the testing process leading to faster deployment cycles and more reliable software products, and also goes over AI's role in predictive analytics and test automation and is definitely gaining traction, which illustrates an important shift in how QA teams are approaching their testing methodologies. So software testers I think definitely need to understand that AI is becoming an indispensable tool in qa. But you should definitely try it out for yourself and see what it could do for you. And don't be afraid. Try embracing AI. See if it lives up to the hype and how it can hopefully lead to improvements in your test coverage, defect detection and resource allocation. I think testers really should be familiarizing themselves with AI driven tools and techniques and that's why I cover it on the show and that's why you definitely should check out more about this in this report down below. So speaking about having quality at every stage of your DevOps pipelines, I'm going to share with you a playbook I just released on the secrets for creating quality DevOps pipelines. And you can get this Test Guild 40 page ebook to help you transform how you deliver quality across each stage of your pipeline. And it's based on industry experts like Lucas Mariani and Javier, CEO of Crowder. And this comprehensive guide reveals hidden techniques to seamless integrate quality checks and security scans all along your pipeline, has insider tips on automating functional and performance testing, and also expert strategies for leveraging top open source tools like Sonarqube and GitLab. So download your free copy now, head on over to the link down below and let me know in the comments what you thought of it. All right, this next post came my way about how to improve system availability on a post from Mark Tomlinson, who shared a recent post by Dynatrace that unveils a significant enhancement to its platform aimed to improving system availability. All right, so in this blog post by Dyntrace written by Bernd, it goes over this update, which introduces a suite of features designed to provide comprehensive monitoring and instant incident resolution, enabling organizations to maximize uptime and service reliability. And it goes over how by leveraging artificial intelligence, Dynatrace ensures proactive identification and mitigation of potential disruptions before they impact users, thereby delivering continuous business operations and and the new capability focuses on delivering detailed insights across all software levels, enabling IT teams to swiftly address issues and optimize performance. And these improvements align with Dynatrace's commitment to deliver seamless digital experiences by maintaining high system availability for their customers. And so I think this is something everyone should be aware of. Not just this particular tool, but any tool in general, leveraging AI and make sure the systems are more resilient. All right, in security news, I just learned about a new tool. It's from Secure Layer 7, which launches an On PREM Bug Daz API Security Scanner and this release is designed to enhance API security by providing businesses with the ability to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities in their API ecosystems. And with cybersecurity threats becoming increasingly sophisticated, these types of tools offer a timely solution for companies seeking greater control over their security measures and in house and Secure Layer 7 emphasizes that the On PREM version allows organizations to maintain data residency requirements and bolster the security posture without external dependencies. I know a lot of enterprises have to deal with, so definitely you should check out as well. All right, for links of everything of value we covered in this news episode, head on over to all the links in the comments down below. So that's it for this episode of the Test Guild News Show. I'm Joe. My missions help you succeed in creating end to end full stack pipeline automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.