Fortnite Down! Metaverse and Selenium AI testing

Hey, looking for an open source solution to help you with your slim automation efforts with flaky locators? Do you actually hear that Fortnite went down a few times during the busy holiday? And are you looking for an open source security automation as code framework? Final answers to these and all other end to end full stack DevOps automation performance and Security Testing in this episode of the Test Skill News show for the week of January 2nd for that new year of 2022. 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 awesome folks at applitools. If you don't know, applitools is the next generation test automation platform which is powered by visual AI. This helps you increase quality, accelerate delivery and helps you to reduce costs. But what I think is the world's most intelligent test automation platform. But I know if you're like me, seeing is believing. So check it out for yourself by creating a free account now by clicking in the links to in the 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 last week Jason Albin actually posted on LinkedIn a holiday gift for test automation engineers from test nerds at Test AI that I think you're really going to find helpful and you definitely should check out. And so Jason doesn't really go into detail of what it is, but if you actually was to click on this link and just like a good present, you need to unwrap it first and once you do, you probably are pretty happy about it. Slam locators can sometimes be an issue with selectors, so Jason has made it available for you to actually start incorporating AI machine learning into your existing Selenium test now. And as of now, this solution works with Python and Java with Selenium running on macOS. And I think in the coming weeks he says he's going to release JavaScript, Appium X UI and Windows support pretty soon. And as Jason points out, a lot of tests have a half life and it's just a matter of time before your automation test starts failing. And a lot of times that's due to a lot of money being spent on fixing or maintaining or fixing up all the broken selectors. So having a solution like this will definitely help make your test more reliable. So thank you Jason for that awesome gift. So as we enter into 2022, a automation tool that's been picking up a lot of Steam the past few years that think really has started to reach a peak now is Cypress. So if you want to learn how to get started with Cypress, if you haven't already, I have a great free resource for you which is another gift pretty much and this is from the folks at applitools. So in this webinar, Cypress Ambassador Philip is going to go over ways on how to set up a new Cypress project, the basics of a Cypress syntax, course concepts and new ideas brought about by using this type of approach of testing we where the true power of Cypress lies, where all the constraints are of Cyprus, and what is the future of Cypress. So so if you had on your to do list for 2022 as one of your New Year's resolutions to learn a new tool or technique, definitely check this out because I think it's a growing trend and a lot of job openings I've started to see recently now also have Cypress listed as a requirement, so it can't hurt to learn it now. So definitely check it out and I have a link for it in the first comment down below. So speaking of the new year, you're probably going to start hearing more and more about the Metaverse or testing in the Metaverse. So I have a good article on getting up to speed and how DevOps is going to help determine who wins the Metaverse race. I think DevOps is a great skill to have as a tester and how you can start learning more about the Metaverse so that when your company starts making this transition or you get a new gig, you kind of already know what the moving parts are that you need to do in order to start testing metaverse type of applications and scenarios. This article just goes over how DevOps is leveling the playing field and it gives four reasons why the metaverse needs DevOps. So if you're someone that likes to get involved in early technology, this is a great place to get started. Metaverse is definitely growing trend you're probably seeing in 2023 and beyond. I think the next coming two years is going to be people just becoming more familiar with it, becoming more creators, just getting their hands dirty. The see what it's all about and I think it's going to stop picking up after that for sure. So great time to get involved early if you haven't already. One thing I always get asked about a lot on my blog and podcast is how can I automate. NET applications or how can I use C? I think C is in leverage as much as it should be. I think it's a great language and that's why I was really excited to see this next announcement on Twitter from the folks at Execute Automation by Karthik on a new course he has on automation testing of modern apps with c c sharp.net so this course looks pretty intensive. You're going to learn C sharp.net using Selenium, XUnit, Dependency Injection, Docker and more. It's over 14 hours of course content and just looks like a really good opportunity for you. If this is something that you want to get more knowledge about about C Sharp with Selenium and automation testing, this is a great cost to check it out at a very low price. So check it out and I'll have it in the links down below. And another great way to get started in new year to accelerate your career in 2022, if you haven't already is register for this year's Automation Guild. It's the largest online event in the world, dedicated 100% just to automation testing. I started it way back in 2017 way before everyone else. So we have a great community of people that have been around for a long time in our private Slack channel. So I highly recommend you check out all the sessions from some of the top automation engineers in our field to discover a tip, tool, technique or best practice that's going to help you and your teams really succeed with automation this year. And so I definitely highly recommend you check it out and register if you haven't already, and hope to see you there. Next up, Performance and Site Reliability News so last month we saw a lot of major companies going down due to AWS having outages and so I would have known about this next one, but I heard that Fortnite went down and had a major outage last week and I had some nephews and nieces staying with us over the holiday season and there was a big like panic because Fortnite was down. And if you check out the link I provide in the comment down below, it goes over the timeline of when it went down, when it went back up, and it also will have updates on what the issue was once they're done investigating. I don't know if it has anything to do with AWS or that type of outage of it's been hacked or it just was. I know they rolled out a lot of new major updates so that could be the cause as well. So just something to keep your eye on. Anytime you see an outage I always think it's important to find out why it went down, even if it's not your application because a lot of times you can learn from someone else's failures so you can bake it into your system beforehand to be a little more proactive so it doesn't happen to you in your company. So definitely check that out in the link down below. So as we saw last month with outages to software like Netflix, Hulu Twitch due to aws, now we see Fortnite down. Not sure why. I think it's going to be even a greater need now for people to start investing in monitoring of their cloud native and treating it as code so they stop monitoring their infrastructure all the way to production so they're able to catch these issues early on before their users are impacted. So this next article goes over why cloud native actually needs monitoring as code and just talks about how monitoring as code is moving from 1.0 to 2.0 and use cases for as code observability tech and some tips on how to start closely monitoring your CICD pipelines and the ultimate goal of a continuous and complete end to end monitoring. Definitely something As I mentioned, as you've seen with all these outages going on, your company needs to start investing in these as well and hopefully this article will help persuade you why you need it. Also, and I think a lot of this actually falls into the realm of site reliability engineering. If you're not sure what SRE is or what site reliability engineering is. It was one of the top trends I saw last year and this year keep hearing more and more about it. Actually Google just launched a new site SRE Google as definitely check out. I first saw this on Twitter hosted by Stephanie Wong with the announcement that they launched the site. And if you actually go to SRE, Google goes over what do SREs do, how they handle it at Google and has a lot of awesome resources around management practices and processes, foundations and principles and just a great resource to have in the new year. So definitely check that out. I also came across a open source tool called Hunter R which helps you detect performance regressions. I believe Scott Moore originally post this and it was actually a repost of a post by Tony and Tony is the one that actually originally posted the Detecting performance Regressions with Open Source Hunter and what's really cool about Hunter? It's a new open source tool by Datastack to automate the analysis of performance test results and Hunter solves the scaling limitations inherent in visual inspection of results and the difficulties in using threshold detection limits to identify issues. So it's going to be a big time saver so thank you Scott and from Tony for posting this in LinkedIn. I think it's going to help a lot of performance engineers for sure. Last up, Security News Princess Enterprise announced the release of Cloud Security Automation as code to the general public. So this is an open source framework that's going to help organizations to deploy secure infrastructure as code. And to learn more, I definitely would check out their GitHub to learn more about how to set it up with Azure. So for everything of value we covered in this week's news episode, head on over to the links in the first comment down below. And while you're there, make sure to check out our sponsor applitools by creating a free account and discover how to take your automation testing to the next level. Leveraging visual AI in 2022. Create a free account now. And so that's it for this episode of the Test Guild News Show. I'm Joe and my missions help you succeed with creating end to end full stack pipeline automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.