Books for Testers and Zen TGNS34

Hey, do you want to know what software testing book to read next? Do you know there are ways you can actually lower your AWS CloudWatch service bill? And have you seen the Latest postmortem on log 4J final the answers to these and all other full pipeline DevOps automation testing, performance testing and Security testing in this episode of the Test Skill New show for the week of March 13th. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and let's do this. This episode of the Test Guild News show is sponsored by the awesome folks at applitools. Ablitools is the next generation test automation platform powered by visual AI who helps you increase quality, accelerate delivery and reduce costs with the world's most intelligent test automation platform. But don't just take my word for it, seeing as 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 let's kick things off with a money segment Blink looks to simplified Cloud operation Management with $26 million investment so Blink's co founders have been working in security and automation for a number of years and they observed that there was a strong overlap between developer operations, DevOps and security operations when it comes to managing cloud infrastructure. When they did some research, they found the potential customers for their startup security management kept coming up and they realized there were two parts to the same problem. What's interesting is that infrastructure teams and developers were telling them that they were spending 30% to 50% of their time doing related stuff. And when we talk about no code low code solutions, a lot of time we're talking about test automation. Blink is actually a no code automation for cloud ops. So this purpose was built built for DevOps and SecOps. So definitely give it a look and just keep up to speed on why these type of solutions are becoming more prevalent. So speaking of AI, this next article caught my attention because it relates specifically to a tool I've heard more about recently and I just found out they actually they were just acquired by CircleCI. So CircleCI has acquired ponycode to gain AI testing tool to their stack. If you don't know, Circle AI is a DevOps continuous integration delivery platform which is becoming more more popular. And it's interesting how they actually decided to acquire a company that focuses on testing or using AI artificial intelligence to help make the review application code of developers much easier. As they're uploading the code into the build. And so they invested in Pony Code, which is a technology that allows you to do just this. And the article goes on to mention that the quality of the code being deployed to drive applications needs to be of a higher quality. With CircleCI being a CI platform as you're checking code, I assume they're going to start using ponycodes acquisition to help with the code review process to help it become more efficient instead of requiring another developer or a dedicated tester to actually review code. Really cool if you use in Circleci. Great development and you definitely should learn more about ponycode. So this next one is how elasticsearch has announced a new capability to help customers defend against cyber attacks and accelerate app delivery. And the reason why I put it under automation is because I know a lot of testers have been using elasticsearch for their dashboarding for the test results of their automation frameworks. There's a bunch of other capabilities that they can leverage as well. So Elastic, which is the company behind elasticsearch and the new enhancements, enables customers to stop advanced cyber threats with new pre built detection and data source integrations and accelerate application development with deeper visibility into serverless architecture and continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines. And so these new pre built type of detection software can actually help you automate protect against sophisticated attacks like log4j or blister malware campaigns. So it really helps customers streamline security investigations and mitigate risk without diminishing visibility. Also, do you want to know what the next software testing book you should read? And so thank you John for posting this question. He wrote any recommendations of books for starting Software Software Testing Club at work. They include technical and soft skills and the audience include not only testing engineers but also software engineers who test. So I was tagged in it. I gave my recommendations but a whole other bunch of folks created their recommendations as well. You can see a whole bunch of cool recommendations. Like Tristan has a cool link to a book club list that he has. We also have Raj with some great suggestions. We have Richard Bradshaw with some great suggestions. We have Mark with some great suggestions. We have Morgan with some great suggestions. So that's what's great about asking questions. A lot of times the question is kind of list. It's a lot of great answers from a lot of people that are sourced in one place. So I have a link to this in the first comment down below so you can definitely check out what everyone recommended as their favorite software testing book. And speaking of software testing books, I actually interviewed Kristen Jack Voni on her latest book on the Complete Software Tester's Guide and in this interview actually break down with Kristen the Authority all about the Complete software Tester concepts, skills and strategies for high quality testing. The book covers a diverse set of topics for those new to testing and experienced testers who want maybe to fill in some knowledge gaps. And so Kristen goes over a whole bunch of different topics like security testing, performance testing, manual testing, exploratory testing. So you definitely want to check out this interview and after the interview is done, definitely head on over to the Show Notes and grab the link for the to get you a copy of the Complete Software Tester Yourself. So thank you Kristen for writing that book, for sharing that resource with your fellow testers. Next up, Performance Insight Reliability News so this next article is all about Zen and the art of reliability. So this article is really cool because it goes over a real world enterprise company, Zendesk, and how they treat reliability and how it's helped them handle over 250,000 requests per second at daily peak. And Jason just talks about his journey for a decade of testing every possible way within Zendesk and how during the 10 years they scaled their engineering organization from 30 engineers to 1400 and they deploy change to production over 80,000 times a year. So they definitely have a great user case here for what's working for them or reliability. Jason covers eight ways that they've implemented reliability to help them in their organizations. So this is a great must read I think for everyone that's into testing and especially site reliability engineers. So give it a read. Once again, this link will be in the first comment down below. So another article that caught my attention was on AWS cloudwatch. So this article Harinda, who's a great resource to follow if you're not following, already goes over when they recently looked at their cloud costs. One thing that stuck out was their CloudWatch cost being the second highest in the list of AWS services compared to the previous month. And the post actually walks you through the steps he used to identify which CloudWatch services and logs were contributing the most towards the costs. So a real nice breakdown of the steps that Horinda used to actually find what services and what logs were creating this cost. So if you're using CloudWatch or if you just want to learn how to troubleshoot better, I think this is a great article to go through. So since I started this new show, we talked a lot about observability. We also talked about AI, but how about how intelligent observability can help unleash innovation so the marriage of AI with observability and the type of benefits you get from that, that's what this next article is all about. How can DevOps practitioners and SRE teams overcome pressure to deliver business value through technology innovation while maintaining a gold standard for a system uptime? And they point to why intelligent observability is critical to actually accomplish this. And the reason for this is the sheer amount of data that someone needs to go through. With all the data being distributed, IT assets are moving around the cloud. There's really a lot of complexity that happens in an incident prone system that are extremely difficult for humans to monitor. And that's where AI machine learning can help Last Up Security News so this next article goes over the log 4J, that exploit that we heard about a few months ago. It's a post mortem and talks about how developers are now taking a hard look at the software supply chain security gaps. So it talks about how developers are exploring new tools and methodologies to help ensure the next log 4J doesn't happen. And it talks about will it actually work? It actually mentions a study by the world's largest nonprofit association of certified cybersecurity professionals that nearly half 48% of security teams gave up holiday time and weekends to assist with the remediation and 52% of teams spent weeks or more remediating log 4J, which is not exactly how already stretched developers want to spend their holidays. And the article goes over ways to fix vulnerabilities while breaking legacy code and also dives into a broader problem which who owns security for open source? So I think it's a good read to get your team started. Think about this as we consume more and more open source projects. Who owns it? What do we do? How do we make it so that we're not spending all our time on these types of remediation? So great article to get you thinking about these things as well. So for links, if everything value we covered in this episode, make sure to check out all the links in the first comment down below. And while you're there, make sure to check out our awesome sponsor applitools by creating a free account and discover how to take your animation testing to the next level, leveraging their awesome platform for visual AI. So that's it for this episode of the Test Guild News Show. Once again, I'm Joe and my mission is helping you succeed in creating end to end full stack pipeline automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.