Cypress Vision, Browser Compatibility, Power of Generative AI and More TGNS106

Have you seen cypress vision for 2024? What's the hidden cost of ignoring browser compatibility? And can you assist your QA process with the power of generative AI? Find out in this episode of the Test Skill News show for the week of December 17th. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and let's do this. This episode of the Test Skill News show is sponsored by the Must Attend Online Conference Automation Guild. The 8th annual online event has an incredible lineup designed to help you succeed with all your end to end automation, performance testing, security testing in 2024. Register now@automationguild.com and hope to see you there. One of Test Guild's most popular webinars this year was From Todd from Reflect about generative AI and automation where Todd demonstrated how Reflects AI powered platform translates plain text instruction into precise actions and assertions. And after I got a bunch of folks tell me they tried Reflecto and after the webinar and we're really pleasantly surprised. So I want to highlight Reflect Platform for folks that may have missed the webinar or our recent podcast with Todd and this automated end to end testing platform really helps redefine how tests are created and maintain, really making it kind of like a big time saver for developers or animation testing QA professionals. And one feature that really makes Reflect stand out is its use of generative AI which we've been talking all about this year. And with this approach it helps you replace the traditional reliance on unreliable CSS selectors or xpath locators. This AI driven approach ensures that tests automatically adapt to applications changes over time, enhancing reliability and efficiency. And what's more, Reflect enables testers to build end to end tests and according to Todd, what Todd has told me, up to 10 times faster than traditional code based frameworks like Selenium or Playwright. And this platform offers a unique blend of features including it has something called AI prompting, visual testing, API testing and it also supports JavaScript, email, JMS testing and data driven testing. So these capabilities really help you to aim to get the most test coverage as possible. And also what I've seen on the webinar and heard on the podcast is Reflect really seamlessly integrates into existing workflows and has a really comprehensive support for CICD issue tracking test management systems. And it also provides detailed test results for every release, ensuring quick notification of failures with its built in email and slack integrations. And with all these features it helps you not have to do a lot of maintenance on your tests which allows your teams really to focus on creating rather than maintaining additional tests and handling ad hoc tasks. So all year long we've been talking about generative AI and automation. So if you're still on the fence and if you haven't tried it yourself, if you want to see if it's the real deal, I recommend you give reflect a spin using the special link down below and let me know how it works for you. So with more and more browsers using the same standard, does testing against different web browsers still matter? Well, David Burns shared his insights about this in his latest blog post, which highlights a frequently overlooked aspect of testing and software development and that is browser compatibility. And he also points out that based on his experience, many businesses are losing valuable opportunities by not testing their sites across different browsers. Dave also emphasizes the diversity of the global browser market, which includes Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Edge. And ignoring these diversities can lead to a poor user experience for a significant portion of your audience, resulting in increased bounce rates and lost business opportunities. And also with the rise of smartphones and tablets, optimizing websites for various screen sizes and browser types is more crucial now than ever, especially considering Google's emphasis on mobile first indexing. And he also goes over some other consequences of ignoring this particular aspect of browser testing. So businesses risk losing conversions and revenues when users encounter issues on their preferred browser and a poor performing website can damage a brand's reputation. And also an often overlooked thing is negative online experiences can lead to really bad reviews in word and mouth publicity that you definitely want to avoid. But Dave also discusses that nowadays with modern testing solutions they really help you with multiple browser testing, especially tools like Selenium Manager and Night Watch js. These tools really facilitate cross browser testing, making it simpler to ensure websites function seamlessly across various devices and browsers. And to learn more, you can find the link for this article in the comments down below. So over the past few months you probably heard some rumors of Cyprus's demise, so it was great to find a resource that goes over the future of Cyprus and puts all these rumors to rest. Hopefully. And this is a video from the founder of Cypress, Brian Mann, who delves into the evolution, vision and roadmap of Cyprus in 2024. So in this video he explores Cypress's advancements in optimizing testing, improving test retries behavior and introducing a puppeteer plugin for browser automation. Really cool feature and with a vision to enhance application quality, measuring it objectively and automatically generating reports, Cypress really is moving beyond test management to offer enhanced test authoring experience and additionally the focus on interactivity coverage, pre production and quality insights and accessibility reporting brings a new aspect, a new dimension to application testing using Cypress. So so definitely check out the video yourself and see some of the latest features of Cypress and how it really is committed to helping improving application quality and testing experience now and in the future. So I'm always on the lookout for new tools, especially new uses of AI, and I was scrolling through my LinkedIn stream and I saw this post by Jordan pointing to a tool that has a really cool solution that uses AI to help you find similar issues. So I found out that Linear is a project management tool and has introduced an AI powered feature called Similar Issues and this feature is designed to tackle the persistent challenge of managing duplicate issues and backlogs in large team workflows. So by utilizing large language models and vector embedding, Linear's new tool simplifies the process of identifying related issues, therefore enhancing support integrations and streamlining issue resolutions. And this article goes into how this feature was developed in response to the common problem of duplicate issues and large teams and extensive backlogs. And it works by suggesting potentially related or duplicate issues during the issue creation process, leveraging the accuracy of LLMs. This approach goes beyond traditional methods of computing similarities based on properties or keywords alone. And an interesting aspect of this feature is its integration into Linear's triage functionality, which helps manage issues with external sources. And it also goes over the core technology vector embedding, which encodes the semantic meaning of data, allowing for groupings of similar issues using simple mathematical operations. So next up, we have a company that's just been acquired by Docker. I actually had Sergey on my podcast and also at one of our conferences a few years ago talking about Test Container. So I was excited to find this latest announcement. And this is how Docker has recently announced its acquisition of Atomic Jar Inc. A startup known for its popular open source Test Containers project. And if you haven't heard of Test Containers or tried it yourself, definitely check out the podcast I did a few years ago. But it's a tool that's widely used for testing software components before the release. And this project success is evident from its really huge download figures exceeding 200 million in 2022, a 100% increase in Docker Hub's polls reaching 100 million. And this growth has made Tescatan is one of the fastest growing projects on Docker Hub. And this news article goes into detail how this is a strategic move for Docker as it aims to enhance its testing capabilities, which is always good news for testers and automation engineers, and Atomic Jaws platform is designed to boost developers productivity and resilience and software creation, contributing to the agility of the organizations that they work for. And Docker CEO Scott Johnston expresses excitement about the acquisition, highlighting the union of two vibrant open source communities. He also reassured users of the open source test containers that there are no plans to change the licensing structure or discontinue any projects. And I really like how this highlights the move by Docker in its mission to offer a comprehensive suite of build and test and deploy services. A really exciting announcement. So congratulations Atomic Jaw and hope to see even more awesomeness from test containers going forward. Have you been doing distributed tracing? Well, you may have been doing it all wrong. So this next article by Cindy challenges the conventional approach to distributed tracing and software engineering. Distributed tracing, if you don't know, is a method used to monitor and troubleshoot complex software systems, and it's often seen as difficult to implement and of questionable value. So Cindy argues that the real issue isn't in collecting or standardizing trace data, but it's how data is used and visualized. So this article proposes alternative visualizations like server centric views, dynamic service topology graphs, and comprehensive views. I think really an underused method for software testers is system or dynamic tracing, and definitely something you should check out as well. And you can find it in the links down below. All right, links to anything of value we covered in this news episode. Head on over to the links in the first comment down below. And and while you're there, make sure to register for our 8th annual online event, Automation Guild, coming in February. So that's it for this episode of the Test Guild new show. I'm Joe. My mission is to help you succeed in creating end to end full stack automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.