Episode 400 Celebration with Special Guests

Welcome to the Test Talks Podcast. The place to go to geek out on software testing. Three, two, one, drop that. Welcome to the Test Guild Automation Podcast. Welcome to the Test Guild Automation Podcast.

Get ready to discover the most actionable end to end automation advice for some of the smartest testers on the planet. Hey, I'm Joe Calantonio, host of the Test Guild Automation Podcast and my goal is to help you succeed with creating automation awesomeness.

Welcome to episode 400 of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. I want to thank you everyone that's been listening since the beginning or even new listeners. Welcome aboard. So it's been an awesome, awesome ride and what I thought it'd be fun for this episode is to reach out to some of our more popular past episode speakers, see what they've been up to and get their latest actual tip, tool technique or best practice that can help you accelerate your automation practices in 2022 and beyond. So I interviewed about 15 folks. I try to cut it down as much as possible. I know I like to keep these episodes around 30 minutes. This goes a little bit over, but I think it's kind of fun just to find out what the folks have been up to since last time they've been on the show and I think it'll get a lot of value. So listen all the way to the end and let me know what you think. And thank you so much once again for supporting the show and hopefully we'll have 400 more episodes. But first let's hear from our awesome sponsor who's been sponsoring the show since 2014, since episode 20. Big shout out to Source Labs. Thank you. I really know, like and trust their product and they've really grown over the years so really hope you check them out if you haven't already.

The Test Guild Automation Podcast is sponsored by the fantastic folks at Sauce 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 test skill.comSourceLabs and click on the exclusive sponsor section to try it for free today. Check it out. Hey Lance, it's great to have you back on the show. Last time we spoke was in episode one. You actually gave me the idea for the podcast. I don't know if you remember, but the first episode was February 18, 2014. Joe, you're breaking my heart because we met again later. I was the first continuing returning guest I believe too. Yes, you were. You were. What episode that was? I think it was episode 15. Oh, wow. You were ready. You sent me out there.

Nicely done. All right, well, it's good seeing you. We haven't. I haven't been on the show for like, what, about 200 episodes or something? What number are you up to now? It's going to be almost. It's going to be 400. This is the 400th episode, so that's crazy. So thank you, thank you, thank you. That's crazy. Wow. Is that crazy? So actually, I met you, you were doing some training for behavior driven development at my company, and I remember coming and say, hey, you should do a podcast called Test Talks and do it on BDD and. Cause I thought it was just a great name. And you didn't take the bait. Cause I love giving other people work to do. Yeah. So I said, heck, I'm going to do it. So. Yes. You didn't. You didn't stick with delegation, Joe. You decided to do it yourself.

So I'm just curious to know, since we started, I met you doing behavior driven development. I'm just curious to know, is it still a thing? Are you still doing behavior driven development? What's your main thing you've been up to lately? Yeah, well, my main thing is same thing as before when I met you. Not always just bdd, but it is a thing. And it's most hot in areas where business and IT collaborate well.

Cool. So if you're one of those groups that don't collaborate well and you're not doing B2D, now you know why. Or if you're trying to collaborate better check it out. Yeah, all about collaboration. But, like, I know we've had this discussion over and over again, but the company I worked for after you left just made it into an automation framework, unfortunately. But it obviously works when you use it for what it's intended to work for, I assume. Yeah, yeah, for sure. It gets the development team thinking more like the end user. And that's pretty powerful because development teams. I'm a developer and I have trouble getting in the user's shoes unless I'm writing software for myself, which almost as no one ever pays me to do that, Joe, I have to do it in my own free time. Right. I don't know what's going on. Absolutely. And I don't pay myself well enough to just do that. I can't make a living paying myself. I don't know why that won't work.

So, Lance, I guess any potting words of wisdom or tips or tricks for 2022, 2023? I think the first one he gave us something about Steampunk. Write your specs as if you were writing for Steampunk or Magic because there's no implementation details. I don'. Do you have any new kind of go to tips or tricks there?

Nothing new, I don't think in the BDD framework area because I think that still is something that people struggle with. They try to use bdd. I mean, if we want to use a little different language, we could say this BDD should not be in the domain language of the development team or the ui. It should be in the domain language of what the user is trying to do.

Absolutely. So that's probably a little profound, but say it in plain English. It's like this. If you let your development team just do B2D on their own, it's going to say like, click here, move mouse here, enter this value in, get back this thing, talk to System xyz, see if authentication is right. Nobody, no end user. Things like that. They're like, I want to go to my bank, I'm going to make a withdrawal or I'm going to buy some stock and then I'm going to log off.

Awesome. Thanks again, Lance. I really appreciate it, helping me kick off the Test Talks franchise and send me on my course. So thank you so much and really appreciate it. Awesome, man. Thank you for having me on the show. I was so excited to see you at 400. That's epic, dude.

Hey Rhianne, welcome back to the Test Guild Test Talks podcast. Happy to be here. Thank you for having me back. So this is the 400th episode. Really excited to have you. I think you joined us on episode 175 back in 2017. Wow. And you were one of the early innovators, I think, in talking about blockchain, blockchain application testing. Since then it's just really taken off. So just curious to know what you've been up to since then. Are you still doing blockchain type of development and testing? Yes. So since we spoke last, I've actually moved full time into what was was kind of more of a hobbyist thing. I'm actually working full time within the blockchain web3 ecosystem now, which is really cool. I'm not hands on testing so much, but from a quality point of view, I'm as quality obsessed as ever. So I've been doing a lot of holistic thinking around what quality means. I'm working after a short stint as a developer elsewhere, I'm now working for really interesting protocol called Boson Protocol. I'm doing developer relations work there, which sounds like a departure from testing. Actually, it's not. You're thinking about tooling, you're thinking about quality, you're thinking about all the same things and how all this fits into the software development life cycle. So it's a fascinating world and I feel really privileged to have made my work hobby my job. You know, last time we spoke, I always asked guests to give me the most actionable tip, tool, technique or best practice they'd recommend in 2022. Now, you know, 2023, we're about halfway there. So anything you'd give advice for now around maybe blockchain or, you know, since you're doing devrel, anything you've been encountering that you think people need to know more about? Can I have two tips? I've got one practical tip and one more all encompassing tip. So my first tip is Playwright is awes for end to end testing. I think I'll say no more about that. But seriously, it seems to be usable in so many different contexts. I love Playwright. So that's my practical tip, my more holistic tip. And this is something I'm going to be talking about at Romanian Test Conference next month, which I'm really looking forward to in person event. Open Source testing. Interestingly, Andrew Knight did a post about this yesterday. His post was actually better than some of the things I've been thinking about. But in terms of open source testing and how the community can actually help you test, I think it's really important we all open our minds to this and there are so many interesting things around it. I think that open source testing is going to be a coming topic over the next few years. So my practical tip is Playwright, my more holistic thing to think about that I'm thinking about. And I know a lot of other people are thinking about open source source testing. Hey Peter, welcome Back to the 400th episode. Hey. So I created Karate five years back as an open source project and I genuinely try to make test automation simpler, more fun. I think I've succeeded to a large extent and in fact recently I just took the plunge, decided to do this full time, leave my corporate job, kind of a big leap. But the mission is to really make testing fun and collaborative even more because I see a lot of work yet to be done. So it's fun, you know, being on your own. You know, I have a great friend and co founder and we started Karate Labs and you would hear a lot more what we are up to. You know, one of the missions we have is, you know, how can we make test automation democratized where you can set up your whole environment in just five clicks. One of the things that's coming very soon is an Intellij plugin, which a lot of people have been requesting for. We have a Visual Studio code plugin also scheduled and as I said.

Move more of test automation to the cloud. And in terms of a tip, yeah, I have this to say, which is I think a lot of time and energy spent nowadays in creating frameworks from scratch. This seems to be a kind of a theme.

In the test automation community. So my very sincere request to the world of test automation is stop creating frameworks. Think of how you can actually contribute to existing frameworks or reuse frameworks. I think the main mission is to just do testing and sometimes I feel that's lost in all the noise. So that's my tip. And so, yeah, all the best. Take care. Hey Alan, welcome to episode 400 of the Test Guild Test Talks podcast. Thanks very much. 400, that's massive. It is massive. And thanks to you. You helped kick it off the first 10 episodes. You were in episode four back in. I think it was May 15, 2014.

That was ages ago. So long ago really was. You did an episode on how to create model driven automation libraries. So I just, I'm just reaching out to past guests and speakers to see what they're up to lately. I know you're really busy. You're always doing things. So what have you been up to since then? Alan?

Alan, summarize the last eight years or whatever it was. That is a hard, hard thing. So to be honest, I don't even remember what I've been doing all that time. I know what I've been doing recently, so I've been doing a lot more devrel marketing type work and still improving my programming. So a couple of weeks ago I had to create a new LMS learning management system so that people on Patreon can log in and get access to all my courses and ebooks. I'm working on a test data tool which shows data in a grid. You can upload CSV files. It will convert them to markdown tables, JSON, HTML and it's got a test data generator that hooks in a faker and you can configure some elements to be generated from regex. So I'm using that to expand my JavaScript skills and learn how to unit test that. And I'll stick some playwright, possibly some cypress in there. So it's just ongoing Experimentation. I've still got chatterscan, which is a Twitter client that reads Twitter in different ways and I'm converting that into an API. So we also, since we last spoke, I've done the API Challenges, which is online, so people can use that as a kind of online learning game to learn API testing. And there's videos for each challenge. So it's basically just a set of challenges. You come in that says get all the to dos. So you have to get the to DOS and then if you pass it, it will start marking everything off. So quite a few things.

Great. And Alan, any recent revelations of things you want to share with the Tesla community you think people should need to know about like in 2022, 23 and beyond. So I think the most important thing is not necessarily to look externally, but look at what you are doing, always look at what you're doing, what's happening in your environment and try to improve your skill sets for that. So at the moment I work a lot with JavaScript, so I'm learning JavaScript and React and really trying to hone in on the core of that. And always try and put whatever you are learning or encountering into practice as much as possible. Use it in your daily life because that's really the only thing that that counts. So if you see something interesting, experiment with it. But if it's not going to add value immediately, don't spend a lot of time messing around with it unless it's a side project, in which case you can do whatever you want, it's fine. Hey Ramona, welcome to episode 400 of the Test Skill Test Talks Automation Podcast. Hey, thank you so much for having me. It's so wonderful to see you again. We were in episode 359 in August 2021, so it hasn't been that long ago, but what have you been up to since then? Well, at the moment the in person conferences are starting to basically happen and it's so amazing. To be honest, I'm not used to in person events because as I started being speaker Covid hit the Internet and so most of my experience was remote. Now I got my first in person conference and yeah, next week there will be a big one. So I'm really excited to give talks about testing and basically about things I messed up in testing and yeah, I'm so, so thrilled to see all those people again, talk with them, teach them and learn from them. So yeah, festival Summer it is. So Ramona, is any actual tips, tools, techniques or best practices you're going to recommend to someone nowadays based on, you know, different than maybe we may have talked about last year. Yeah, that's one. It is a GitHub repository, but it's basically a collection of wonderful tips, best practices, ways of writing tests or dealing or structured tests. So it's the guide of Uni Gotberg. It's called JavaScript Testing Best Practices. It's not only covering engine testing, but also integration and unit testing. So if you don't know it by now, please check it out. It helped me a lot to get better.

Hey Greg. Welcome to the 400 episode special. That's amazing, Joe. I can't believe 400 episodes already. Congratulations. That's a big deal. Thank you so much. Really unbelievable. And thanks to. Do you know you're the. The person that's been on the show the most. Wow.

I remember our first show that. Yeah, seems like ages ago. It was. It was in 2014 of April. Can you guess how many times you've been on the show?

Five, six times? I don't know. Nine times. You're the old time record holder. Yeah, it's crazy. Wow, that's an honor. I always love spending time with you and the audience. This is a great group of people that, you know, we've had a chance to kind of grow with and see mature over time too on the show in 2014. But you've been on nine times. What you've been up to since then?

Well, I've been working with a great new automation engineer who's come on board with me. Boy, we have been exploring some really cool stuff. We just last week created our fifth automated product. I call it Automated Data Acquisition. It just shows that the ways that you can use automation to serve your company and customers can really come in many shapes and sizes. And this hearkens back to some of my early days of automation in the 80s working for the aerospace. So it's almost a revisit of this idea of acquiring data, doing post analysis on it, presenting it to a customer that really could use that information. So I'm excited about yet one more tool in our tool belt. Awesome. The first time you want you did helpful tips when implementing test automation. So do you have any latest and greatest helpful tips that you can share with the guild members there? Yeah, I mean I find that there's some reoccurring things that come up a lot and you know, it seems like more than ever, Joe, you know, there's a new tool every week that seems to be popping up. The last framework I've heard of is Playwright now is the latest and greatest. And I kind of try to help coach folks around this idea that there's still nothing too new under the sun. So don't be intimidated by it. Kind of pick the flavor that works best for you. You know, have an awareness of what's out there and. But it's not always best to just abandon what you're working on to go to the next thing, make sure it makes good sense, and run from it from there. I just did a couple podcasts recently since you and I first started. I now have crafts of testing. Those are a handful of podcasts of tips and things like that that I love to share. And probably one tip I would love to share with our automation community is this idea of Go for Green. And I've got a video on that. I think you and I have spoken about that on your show many times, where this idea that we get stuck in the mindset of trying to get a test case done and not really testing anything, it could. It can, you know, sneak in with anybody. It can sneak in from a manual testing perspective and an automated perspective. So those are some of my. My recent tips that I've been sharing quite a bit on. Hey, Boz. Welcome to the fourth hundredth episode of the Test Guild Test Talks podcast. Thank you, Joe. Congratulations on reaching 400 episodes. Thank you. Thank you. And it's thanks to speakers like you. You're one of our most popular speakers. You joined us, I think January 2017, you were talking about API and automation testing. I looked it up. I don't know the actual date anymore. I know that for some reason that I remember. That was episode 137. Yeah. So it's a couple of episodes ago. Yeah.

So it seems like you were really in on API testing early on. It seems like a specialty you've been doing, I guess. What have you been up to since then? Are you still into APIs? What are you working on, what you've been up to? Lots of different things. Right. So I know we only got a couple of minutes, so. Yeah, I'm still seeing that whole API testing trend still. The need for API testing skills is ever. Is still growing, and especially now with. And I saw you just recorded a session with Lewis on contract testing. That. That's.

That's another thing that I've been spending a lot of time on recently. And other than that, mainly it's. It's my new gig at Inspire Testing where I'm responsible for all of the training that we do at Inspired Academy. So creating and delivering training Opportunities for our own staff. So we are about 300 software testers, but also for the global software testing community. You know, what are some things that you think people need to know in 2022, 2023, since you spoke to us on 2017? Any new trends or tools or techniques or best practices or just life principles in general that you think we should know about? So, yeah, as you probably know, I'm not too big on trends. Maybe it's because I'm old fashioned, maybe it's just not really my thing.

But one of the things I keep on repeating is focus on the fundamentals. So I'd like to say principles and patterns over tools and tricks. I know tools are fun, tools are good. I love working with, tinkering with tools, trying out new tools.

But I think if, if you want to really get ahead with software testing, software development, automation, anything, it's so important to keep focusing on not just the tools, but also the underlying principles. So don't just learn automation, but learn first how to become a better tester and also how to do object oriented programming, because that's going to be extremely helpful in delivering better automation solutions. So if you'd asked me for one tip, it would be that focus on principles and patterns and not just on the tools and tricks, no matter how fun they are. Hey, Amber, welcome back to the podcast. Welcome to the 400th episode. Great to have you back. So we've been up to since last time we spoke. Yeah, it's interesting because I was like, you know, I had decided to take a break in 2019 from the conference scene because I kind of overdid it the year before and then I was ready to make a big, brilliant comeback in 2020 and it didn't happen. Oh no.

And, and then let's see what else is going on. I left Big fish Games.

In 2019 and I went to work for the Climate Corporation as a test architect. And then after a couple of years of that, I decided I didn't want to be a test architect anymore. I just wanted to be a regular tester down in the trenches. That's what I really enjoy doing.

Not telling other people what to do, but just doing it. So.

So since in about a year, almost exactly a year ago, I started working at Adobe, so I'm working on Adobe, the Adobe Express product. So that's as. As just a regular test automation writing person. So that's awesome. I know. You were one of the first people to really get into API testing. Yeah. Last time your episode was in 2016. So.

At Adobe, do you find yourself still using API testing or. My work now at Adobe is much more focused on front end testing.

You know, I had been spared the horrors of front end testing up until this point, basically. So, you know, working with Selenium and the Playwright and all the different ways that people try to get computers to act like human beings, which is of course extremely difficult.

So API testing and I, you know, I knew this all along, in a way, it's a lot easier than front end testing because you're just acting. You're asking the computer to act like a computer and that's a lot easier than asking. That's a good point. Like a human. Yeah. Yeah, awesome. So I guess, you know, every time I end an episode, I usually ask for an actual tip, tool, technique or best practice should give to someone. So 2016, you gave some advice. What would you give for advice in 2022, 2023? Looking forward. You know, it's funny, I kind of put this out a couple of days in advance so I could think of something wise to say. And it's, I, you know, it's.

My views on this of, you know, because of all the changes in my own life and in the world and everything, I've sort of taken a much, you know, I'm 52 years old, I'm not a young person. I hear you.

So I think, I really think that people need to find what they like to do and just keep doing that. Don't feel like you have to, you know, I, I left Big Fish Games and I had been there for 10 years, so it was, it was fine to move on. And I thought, oh, I'm going to stretch myself. I'm going to, you know, move up the ladder and be a more important type of person because that's what I'm supposed to do with my life. And it turned out really not to be the thing for me.

So, you know, if you're happy just being.

A plain old test automator or a plain Old Testament tester who's mostly doing manual type testing and that's fine, there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, you shouldn't feel like you're inadequate or you're not as good of a tester because you don't, you know how to do everything in Cypress or you're not keeping up with all the latest changes in JavaScript or whatever.

If you're happy doing what you're doing and you're contributing, you feel like you're contributing to a product that you think is a fine product for whatever that is. You know, maybe your product isn't changing the world, but if.

Then that's fine. You can just keep doing that and you don't have to, you don't have to push yourself to do things that maybe you're not comfortable doing or that don't bring you joy. Hey Ron, welcome to episode 400 of the Automation Guild Test Skill Test Talks podcast.

Hey Joe, happy to be here again. Always a pleasure to collaborate with Test Guild, the Automation Guild. And thank you for everything you are doing for this community. I appreciate you. Perfecto also that you work for has been a big promoter of Automation Guild, so thank you for that. Been sponsoring us since 2016. Actually I think that's the first time you appeared on our show is in 2016. So Aran, what have you been up to since then?

Just four books in the last. Just four books? Yeah, nothing that heavy. Actually the latest book I just released my, my last book, that's the fourth one about web developers Guide to testing, featuring some of the coolest test automation frameworks for web Cypress Playwright, puppeteer, Selenium of course. So yeah, I've been writing books, talking at shows including Automation Guild. I try not to miss any annual event from you, Joe. So yeah, writing content, writing books, speaking at events, accompanying Perfecto and Blazemeter under Perforce quite recently. So yeah, good stuff. Awesome. And Iran, I guess before we go, any actual tips, tools, techniques, the best practices for anyone that's listening in 2022, 2023. I know you gave one in 2016, but what's the latest thing you've been hearing or doing lately? So I'm hearing a few things. One of them is the transition to more single code based technologies. So you start seeing more and more adoption of this progressive web. It started a few years ago by Google, but now any browser technology and platform supports this progressive technology. So if you go today to instagram.com, twitter, eBay and many other websites, they are all progressive, which means you can install a web client on your mobile device without going through the app store. So that's one. The second one still under this single code base is Flutter. Google again paving the road to innovation. So Flutter is the next big thing that we are seeing, not just for my customer base, but the entire marketplace is starting to look at Flutter as a single code base for applications that you can deploy on web, on mobile, on desktop, Windows, Linux, macOS, Fuchsia from Google. So it's kind of a one code that runs on every single possible platform So I think that's the biggest trend that I'm seeing right now, other than the things that, you know, I wrote in my book. Right. We see Cypress and Playwright challenging Selenium. Selenium was the leader for many years. Now we see Cypress and Playwright becoming quite dominant. So I would say these emerging frameworks that we still, you know, we talk, talk about all the time. And the single code base, in my mind, technologies are the biggest thing that I see today. All right, Andy, welcome back to the Guild. Hey, how's it going, Joe? Good to be back. Awesome. Great to have you. When you first showed up on the podcast, I think it was episode.

260 in July of 2019 on Python test Automation. Long time ago. Hard to believe. Yeah. So that's why I want to get you back on the show just for the 400th episode, share some insight of what you're up to now and maybe like your latest go to tip tool or technique that you recommend to folks. The first one is what have you been up to? So for the past half year, I've been developer advocate at applitools. I'm no longer a rank and file software engineer. At Test, I am developer advocate. So I'm helping people, going to too many conferences, speaking to too many webinars, trying to help people understand what visual testing is and why it's awesome, and also trying to help Apples keep a pulse on the community. Great, great. So I know you've been doing a lot of speaking, going to a lot of webinars, a lot of different events. So have you learned anything from speaking to a lot of different folks that maybe you didn't know about before you became a developer like evangelist advocate? Man.

Gosh, I feel like there's been so much stuff in my head over the past six months. It's hard to just nail down one thing. I guess overall, one thing I've learned is that I've already knew people are awesome. How important community is, especially in a world stricken by Covid and other kinds of problems that we have each other. That's kind of been my big takeaway. I mean there have been like little tiny points of like, hey, we should refine this feature in this dashboard, or we should make this thing a little bit faster. But eh, nice. So I actually spoke to Adam Carmey in 2015 on the show, and visual validation was just like they created that space, basically that category. Do you find yourself that people still don't know about visual validation, or is it just like you need to get them over the hump. Now I think it's more if you need to get folks over the hump. If you say visual testing, people kind of put two to two together what it is, what I'm finding is that a lot of people think it's this.

This nice to have add on. Right. That, oh, well, we can still be effective at testing without it. Why do we need this? And I'm thinking, oh my gosh, like, it simplifies things so much. You, you capture so much more with your verifications. If I could go back in time to my previous company at the start of that project and do it over again, that's probably the number one thing I would have done differently. I would have brought in visual, automated visual testing from the start and it would have simplified a lot of things for us. Any go to, you know, tip or technique or actual advice you'd give to someone now as we celebrate the 400th episode. Sure. So a couple things I would say is be excellent in all things. Love your neighbor as yourself. Stay tuned to the Test Skill because, I mean, it's awesome. Joe, you do an amazing show and you're always pumping out stuff. I'm always looking at your newsletters and stuff and yeah, just stay tuned. Stay on top of new technology, ride it like a wave. Things like automated visual testing, things like Playwright just came out and it's really hot and awesome. Stuff like that. Don't, don't let yourself fall out of, out of style. Welcome back to the Test Skill Test Talks Automation podcast, episode 400. Hey Joe, thank you so much for having me. Always a pleasure. Yeah, thanks, man. Yeah, it's actually been a while. I think I haven't been on your show for a number of years, but definitely thank you for inviting me. So in terms of what I've been up to, yes. Since it's been a number of years, I say a lot of things have changed. One of the things that I've realized and I've been really trying to focus on is giving back to the community and help spread testing awareness just all throughout the community. I set myself like a personal goal that I want to train a million as that in testing. And so I've really been focused on providing free content on YouTube and Udemy, creating different kinds of courses and for myself personally, I really wanted to improve my white box testing skills. So I've been. Prior to, you know, the last few years, I've done a lot of white box testing skills, but it was more like the unit and integration layer. And when it came to, like, web applications. I tested them a lot through like Selenium, you know, Cypress and so on. But recently I've been focusing more on how to build and test web applications so that I can better understand how those web applications actually work. So, yeah, if you want to learn how to do all that, you can go to my YouTube channel at Ultimate QA, find me on Udemy. Like I said, I put up a bunch of free courses there. Oh, and then the other cool thing that I'm really doing is I started this Testing for Good initiative that is also based around similar idea, but it's basically me doing a bunch of workshops training people in different kinds of testing skills. And then the workshops are absolutely free. But then what I do is I ask people for donations and then we use those donations to give back to a greater cause. For example, so far, like since I started the initiatives, we've raised over $15,000 for different kinds of NGOs. Environmental NGOs, a lot of them, actually, because I'm a big environmentalist. So, yeah, that's kind of what I've been up to since last time we talked. What's your actual tip, tool, technique or best practice you think a tester could put into place today to help their career or help their automation projects?

Yeah, I was thinking a lot about this because you reached out to me and let me know what we're going to talk about here. And there's obviously a lot. I bet you get a lot of different answers. I was trying to kind of like, man, like, what would be the most impactful one? I think that one that we still need to continue to work on in testing to get better is to try and make our test more atomic. However, this is. This is super common at like lower levels. Unit tests are pretty much all atomic. Unit test. That's exactly what they are. Right? You test a function of add two plus two, does it equal four? That's an atomic test. Nobody does two plus two equals four and then they start adding subtraction in there plus multiplication plus other functionality. But at higher levels, when we talk about, like from the UI layer, we still tend to have long flows. There are many reasons for that. But the goal here is to try to avoid those long flows. And there are many ways to do that. I've actually, I had a bunch of questions around this, so I did create a Twitter thread. So if you go to my Twitter, you'll find a huge Twitter thread of all the resources that I have found over the years that make this topic Easier to digest. It is a big topic and kind of complicated, but hopefully that's a great place for you to start and then make your 2022, 2023 testing journey even better. Hey Tanya, welcome to episode 400 of the Test Skill Test Talks podcast. Thank you so much for having me. You were in episode 250 back in. It was already two years ago, April 2019, so just wanted to catch up with you, see what you've been up to since then.

Since we met. I founded a startup called We Hack Purple and it was an online academy where I taught secure coding, Azure Security, how to be an application security engineer. And we had this huge online community and last month we were acquired by Bright Security and Bright Security, yes, yes. I was on the technical advisory board for Brightness for a year and a half before the acquisition. So I already. These are my guys, right? And I knew them for a long time before that. And so yeah, so since this is the Test Guild podcast, what they do is testing security testing and they do unit security testing and dynamic security testing. And so yeah, per the acquisition. The thing I want to tell you the most, Joe, is that all of the courses from Wehack Purple are now free in the community for everyone in the entire world to take. So everyone can do secure coding, everyone can learn Azure security, everyone can become an AppSec professional. And I'm really, really excited and grateful to Bright for that. So Tanya, before we go, is there a tip, tool technique or best practice you're recommending to folks nowadays in 2022, since the last time we spoke, that may be different what you recommended last time, I would say every single person before they release their code should scan it with at least one security tool. I ideally like to do three, some dynamic analysis where it interacts with your app, and then some static analysis. So it looks at all the code your team wrote and then software composition analysis, basically look at your dependencies. So all the code you didn't Write, like a RubyGem or some sort of NuGet plugin for net, all of those and check them that no one already has reported that there's something seriously wrong with it. So known vulnerabilities. Joe, you have no idea how many people are using components that we've known forever have serious, huge problems with it and they're still using it. And it's like, why? Hey Kuo, welcome to episode 400 of the Test Skill Test Talks Automation Podcast. Hi Joe, thank you. Great to have you back. First had you on the show, I think in 2017, you were talking about mobile testing pyramid that you came up with, which is really cool. So I just want to know what you've been up to since then, what's going on? Yeah. So mobile at that time to UI testing, but recently I've been working on microservices, backend testing. So more on API databases, contract testing. So yeah, avoiding a browser. So really looking at the backend. Yeah. Nice. Is that easier when you avoid the browser? Not easier. It's very different. Different things to cope with, especially if you think about data.

How to cope with data and different types of data across different services, service to service communication. Yeah, it's a whole different spectrum. Absolutely. So I guess since you've made kind of not the shift, but you're focusing on something different, I assume your actual tip or takeaway to someone that's listening to the Show now in 2022, 2023 might be a little bit different. So you have any actual advice for folks listening? Yeah, actually I've always been on this whole whole stack, like front end, back end. Just recently I'm focusing more on the backend and I think that my top tip would be.

Don'T focus on the end to end only. That's usually the first thing people ask me to do or to focus on like, oh, end to end. Let's connect everything together, all the dots together. But yeah, there's so much more to gain on these integration and service level, if you think about contract testing and more usage of marks and stubs where you can really isolate the software you're testing, where you want to have your feedback on, to have your confidence from testing. Because that's why we're doing it, right. Yeah, there's so much more to gain and that's why you also see this shift in this testing pyramid. You know, the old school testing pyramid. Some recent developments in that space you see like this more honeycomb approach where it focuses more on integration and even less on unit level, where you really can gain more confidence on this integration level. Yeah. Hey Rex, welcome to episode 400 of our test talks, Test Guild Automation Podcast. Thanks for having me, Joe. Your episode did really well when you appeared on I think it was 2019 in August. You also presented at Automation Guild the same year, I think, and it was one of the highest rated sessions there as well. And it was on testng. So curious to know what you've been up to since we last spoke. Know what I've been doing the same thing for. Creating blogs, creating videos and also creating blogs for other companies. Plus creating content as a contractor or consultant, writing blogs and creating videos for myself and other people, other companies. And I want to say congratulations on your 400 episode. The same thing, just creating content. I love to share information. You know, we spoke in 2019, so I always ask people one actual piece of advice you can leave someone. So I'm just curious to know any actionable piece of advice you'd give someone now in 2022, 2023 that you think people need to know about, about automation testing or testing in general. Yes, my advice or tip would be to make sure to learn the programming language because I believe a lot of people like to rush past programming into automation because there are some things you can do with automation without really understanding programming. So I recommend learning programming and also get a design pattern like page object model because it helps with your framework and your project if you know the design pattern. Hey Paul, welcome to the 400th episode of the Test Guild, formerly Test Talks podcast. Thank you, Joe. It's a pleasure to be invited here. I'm always happy to talk with you. Yeah, you're always one of the more popular guests. Usually. Our Halloween special does really well and the first episode I believe you came on was episode 103 in 2016. Yeah, yeah, got on there. You. You. I was listening to your podcast, driving to California to go visit my father when, when I heard that some. Some of your. Your podcast going on back in 2014, the early, early times. And then I was thinking I got to get on this because Joe's got a just a great show and he's got great guests. So I, I made it my goal to get on there and I'm always happy to come back and, and I love that Halloween theme we got going on. Absolutely. Yeah. So what I wanted to do is I just want to reach out to some of our more popular guests and just see what they're up to and maybe what their Latest go to tip 2 technique or best practices that they're that they're advocating for 2022 and 2023. So. So Paul, first off, I guess what have you been up to? Well, I believe on our last time we talked last year, I just picked up a job working for guaranteed rate and I'm still working there. It's great. It is probably the best. No, I'm not probably. It is the best job I've had. Second to Redbox and or a red Box, what used to be the number one and guaranteed rates. Just fantastic. We have a lot of great people. It's a lot of interaction. We have standups, a lot of different groups that I interact with probably about 40 to 50 different people. And we are all automation junkies on, on all that. So I love what we do. And I'm. This is actually the first time I'm a lead quality assurance engineer and I'm a manager. So.

One of the major projects out there and I love it. Cool. So Paula, I guess what's your latest that you've been working on? What's your like go to tip tool technique or best practice or actual tip you can give someone.

That may be new to you that you're excited about? Yeah. Well, our automation framework is basically called the Tiger Test Automation Engine Resource. And one of the things we have to do is create a mortgage loan application. And we do it multiple times a day in all sorts of different ways. One of the major challenges we had was that this is a whole bunch of questions that are being asked and sometimes the question orders get changed. And we were having a lot of maintenance where you change the order, you have to go maintain the script and go change the order on the whole thing. And one of my people I worked with clued me into that. Our URL actually uniquely identifies every page that we've got. So I instead created a loop that went and said, okay, what page am I on and what data I got to put into it and click the next button and then check the next page. So we went from a flow based automation approach to more of like a state based automation approach. And it's been able to basically it adapts to whatever flow is in there. If page disappears or orders change, it doesn't matter. My script still gets the end, creates a loan. And we also found that we do this with five different other products out there. And it didn't matter which product we had, the flow still got to the end, created the loan. And everybody's really excited about, about that. So that's our major trick that we've, we've figured out in the last, just last few months to make our automation good. Hey, Marcus. Welcome to the 400th episode of the Test Talks Test Guild Automation podcast. It's great to be here, Joe. Thanks. Awesome. So what I'm really excited about is Sauce Labs has been with us pretty much since the beginning, episode 20 in 2014. So I want to thank you all for that big round of applause for Sauce Labs. And well, I'm really impressed by Sauce Labs. It's a company I know like and trust and you've all have grown so much since 2014. So for the folks that aren't familiar with Sauce Labs after all these years, what are you all working on? What's new? What's going on there? Well, as you know, you know, we've got one of the better the infrastructure clouds in the market. We offer desktop virtual machines as well as emulator simulator mobile as well as real device mobile lab. Best in the world. It has the biggest depth of devices as well as the best enterprise support for all of that, for being able to scale up your testing. But we looked about three years ago and we know that if we had just stuck with that and stayed with that, that probably wouldn't have remained quite as relevant. And so what we try to do is really start to offer a more holistic offering to the left and the right of the traditional Selenium testing outlook. So we go a little bit to the left with Cypress puppeteer, playwright, Test Cafe. We go a little bit further to the left. We have API testing as well as, you know, contract testing, mock testing, that kind of thing for APIs. And we also give you the ability to go to the right now to do some beta testing, field testing, as well as crash error reporting and app distribution, stuff like that. So to me it's, it's the ability to be the testing complement to your CI CD system in order to be able to release your software in a way that is much more consistent, much more sustainable and very much enterprise support for the whole process. So cool stuff there. So, Markus, I guess before we go, I always ask folks, what's the number one actionable piece of advice you give to someone now in 2022, heading into 2023 that you think everyone should know nowadays? Yeah, I'm going to split it up into two with the number one thing I think that I would say to help your own career would be to get to know the single most important flow throughout your software that will help your users the most. Identify the top revenue generating thing that happens on your app. Become intimately familiar with every single aspect of it, all the pages, all the interactions, all the possible error scenarios and all of the analytics and the things the API calls underneath the covers that happen so that you can be there first to say, I guarantee that the most important flow here is happening and people will start to listen to you when you are able to make statements about the risk profile of the most important aspect of your software. Now the thing you can do to help your users the most is to start to think about accessibility, testing and allowing and being inclusive of your audience and realize that 15% of the world who uses the Internet requires some sort of assistive technology in order to be able to use your product. If you're the best, if you're the first to market as the best, you're going to capture a lot more of that audience than your competitors will. Great advice. Thanks so much, Marcus. Once again, thank you Sauce Labs for helping us all these years. Really appreciate you and all that Sauce Labs has done, not only for the testing, pretty much for the testing community, but everything. I know you also help open source projects as well, so thank you. Absolutely. Thank you very much, Joe. You're doing a great job here. Great service. Thank you everyone for your automation awesomeness. For links to everything of value we covered in this episode, head on over to testguild.com a400. And while you're there, make sure to click on the Try for free today link under the exclusive sponsor section to learn all about our awesome sponsor, Sauce Labs. So that's it for this episode of the Test Guild Automation podcast. I'm Joe and my mission is to help you succeed with creating end to end full stack automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.