Digitial Testing, Al-Driven Mobile Attacks, Accessibility Plugins and More TGNS141

How do you automate across multiple systems and technologies? Have you seen all the open source accessibility plugins available for Cypress? And do you know how to stop AI driven mobile attacks by automating prevention baked into your CICD pipelines? If not, find out in this episode of the Test Guild News show for the week of November 10th. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and let's do this. Before we get into if you haven't already, please make sure to subscribe to Our Test Guild LinkedIn New Show Newsletter that have a link for down below to never miss another episode. So last week I interviewed test results IO founder Tobias on my Test Guild Automation podcast last week. It's going to be released next Sunday and he told me about a webinar he'll be hosting that I think it's really going to help you. So this webinar is taking place on December 5th and it really focuses on helping you reshape your test automation. Andy told me he's going to take a real deep dive in this webinar to address the growing complexity and testing flow full digital business processes from initial user authentication to API calls, OS specific interactions, and even PDF and file operations. And this 30 minute webinar offers a structured approach for software testers with automation engineers aiming to manage these challenges across web, mobile and desktop applications. And he also told me he's going to share some strategies to help you reduce test maintenance costs, detect bugs earlier and and create more effective test processes. And the presentation is going to emphasize customer centric testing, showcasing participants, how to implement approaches that prioritize end user experience, reduce testing times from weeks to hours, and ultimately lead to more reliable software releases. I highly recommend you register for this webinar now using the link down below. Hope to see you there. So Open source is a hot topic. If you use Cypress, you're in for a treat because I found an article that talks about three different open source accessibility plugins you need to know about. And this blog post by Mark goes over all this and more and this blog post highlights advancements in open source accessibility plugins, emphasizing tools that enhance testing workflows. So what are the plugins? Well, the first one is the Cypress Voice plugin developed by Dennis, which utilizes the native web Speech API to audibly announce test results, aiding testers who may not be actively monitoring the the Test runner. Additionally, the Cypress Test Runner plugin offers alternative themes for the Cypress Test Runner, including options tailored for colorblind users, improving visual accessibility, and the Wick plugin created by Sebastian, who is a test guild member integrates the AXE core library to automate accessibility checks within Cypress test, streamlining the detection of accessibility issues. So I think if you're doing anything with Cypress these are some must use open source plugins. Accessibility is huge nowadays and you can find out more about it in the links down below. Also on LinkedIn I found an article by Benjamin announcing that Clucumber, a tool for generating clear and concise reports from cucumber BDD JSON files, has released version 3.90 and this update introduces several fix and enhancements, notably the addition of a Doc mode feature contributed by Giuseppe and this doc mode aims to improve readability and reduce eye strain for users working and and low light environments. Next up is how to stop AI driven mobile attacks. How do you do it? Well, Karen highlighted a growing concern in the cybersecurity domain. AI driven mobile attacks and these sophisticated threats leverage artificial intelligence to bypass traditional security measures and target mobile applications. Karen emphasizes the importance of integrating security into your continuous integration continuous deployment pipelines to counter these threats effectively and she covers how automating preventive measures organizations can better protect their mobile assets from sophisticated attacks and reduce the time between detection and response. And she gives some examples on how this is done and I think as software testers we really should recognize the increased complexity of threats caused by AI powered attacks and mobile applications and this necessitates an updated approach to testing that includes security and at every stage of the development life cycle. And I think this is a great post to get you started there and you can find it once again down below. Are you looking for a tool to help you with exploratory testing? Well, I also came across this by Viv Richards, who's introduced a Journey Capture free Chrome extension aimed to enhance exploratory testing and journey mapping. This tool is cool because it enables users to document web interactions by capturing screenshots, system information and network logs. It also offers annotation features for highlighting key elements and support exporting data for collaboration. It's really designed for testers and developers and Journey Capture seeks to simplify the documentation of complex web processes. So I'm always on the lookout for new tools. I was really excited to come across this on LinkedIn as well. It's by Jdeep and he talks about a new tool called Phantom QA which is a new AI powered foam framework agnostic API automation platform and is now open for early access. What's it all about? Let's check it out. This was designed to streamline API testing Phantom QA integrates seamlessly with frameworks like java, rest assured, JavaScript and Pytest, which offers flexibility for a bunch of different diverse tech stacks. Some key features it helps with is AI Powered automation because it employs advanced AI to streamline API testing processes. Aim to reduce minimal testing time while increasing your testing accuracy. It also is framework agnostic, so it works smoothly with popular frameworks. It also was created to help reduce testing cycles. QA Phantom is currently offering a free trial for early users who joined the wait list, which you can find down below. Seems like a cool initiative and check it out for yourself all right, I know AI is everywhere, but here's another example of AI it's by and this is how IBM has developed AI agents to automate software engineering tasks. So this development is part of IBM's broader initiative to integrate artificial intelligence more deeply into software development processes. And it goes over how these AI agents are equipped to handle a range of tasks from code generation and testing to bug identification and resolution. And it helps by automating these often time consuming tasks. It aims to increase efficiency and allow human engineers to focus on higher level work that requires complex problem solving and creativity. But just another way and another company applying AI to software development and testing that you should probably check out for yourself and see how this is the new wave of where I think the future is going with testing and speaking about AI. Powersoft also has unveiled AI driven enhancements to its suite of testing solutions which aims to streamline and reduce complexities involved in software testing. And this announcement goes over that. Powersoft is claiming that these tools can intelligently generate test cases, help you to optimize test execution and enhance test coverage. So some of these key AI initiatives is this live unit testing and JTests, which allows developers to receive immediate feedback on code changes before committing them. It also highlights some machine learning driven test impact analysis features and talks about extending LLM support for various large language model providers. And it can be accessed across SOA tests and virtualized platforms. All right, the rage a few years ago was moving everything to the cloud, but then I started to hear a bunch of people saying how much it costs now. So this article talks about how to reduce your cloud spend by 20%. It's in a recent blog post which outlines strategies to simplify and reduce your cloud infrastructure spending without sacrificing performance. And this article includes key steps involving optimizing the usage of cloud resources, right, sizing virtual machines and reviewing service configurations to eliminate unnecessary expenditures. This is a real world case study where Duolingo utilized automated tools to better monitor and manage cloud expenses, and by adopting these measures, the company was able to achieve substantial savings ensuring that resources utilized more efficiently. And it gives a bunch of examples. So as you know, as cloud service becomes an integrated part of software development testing, you need to understand how to efficiently allocate and manage these resources. I think it's critical testers should be aware of their testing environments, costs, and advocate for tools that provide transparency and control over these expenses. All right, for links of everything of value we covered in this news episode, head on over to the links in the comments down below. So that's it for this episode of the Test Skill New show. I'm Joe. The mission is help you succeed in creating end to end full stack pipeline automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.