How to Measure to Improve Quality, Hacking Fun and More TGNS54

How do you measure to improve quality? Have you seen the new webtest recorder, Chrome Extension and what pen testing tool aims to keep the fun in hacking? Find all the answers to these and all other end to end full pipeline DevOps software testing, automation testing, performance testing and security testing in 10 minutes or less in this episode of the Test Skill News show for the week of August 14th. 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. Applitools is a visual AI validation that's a must have for any automation project, but don't miss it. Check it out yourself with this free account offer that applitools is offering right now by clicking in the link 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 and Testing News Are you using Cypress and do you need to test a PDF file? If so, listen up. So this next article is by Philip, one of the Cypress ambassadors that you must know and must follow and he goes over exactly how to accomplish testing a PDF file with Cypress. So he has an example, he shows how to verify the download, how to check the contents of the file, has code examples and a lot more. So definitely check that out in the first comment down below. So if you're on an agile testing team, you probably struggle a lot with finding how do you actually measure to improve quality without using meaningless KPIs like number of automated tests or things that really don't add value to the full quality of what you're releasing. So this next article goes over how to measure to improve quality by two leaders in the quality space that everyone knows and you have to follow. So check it out. So this is by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory and it goes over why quality is hard to define, goes over some trends they saw in a recent survey by the state of DevOps, and then they go over some metrics mostly related to process quality, but that can also be used to influence product quality as well, like lead time to change deployment frequency, time to restore service, and more. So if you have anything to do with quality or software testing or software development, this is a must read. And also make sure to give Lisa and Janet a follow up because they are the go to experts basically in this area. So I don't know how many of you are actually in the Australian Sydney type time zone, but I'll be hosting event at that time I'm actually in the Eastern time zone so I have to stay up wickedly, which I never do. I usually don't stay up past 9pm so if you want to join me and cheer me on to get through this event, you definitely want to check out this one by applitools, which is the future of testing apac. And as always it's a free virtual event that's going to go over some sessions that help you gain a fresh perspective and insights on long term challenges with software testing. And you can see some of these awesome speakers that are lined up for this. So definitely register below in the first comment down below. Want to find out a cool way that allows you to automatically synchronize your browser checks from GitHub? This next release is by the folks at Checkly with their new GitHub browser check synchronization just went into public beta, so using Checkly's GitHub sync, you can now develop your Playwright or puppeteer scripts locally and link them with Checkly to keep them updated via git and has some highlights of this new feature like how to define your code sync strategies, how to reuse code in local file dependencies, and how to reuse your code and load local file dependencies. So if you never heard of Checkly or this type of feature sounds like something your team can really benefit from, definitely check it out in that first comment down below. Selenium just announced that Selenium 4.40 is now available. So what new features does it have? Let's check it out. So this new release added support for cdp. It also has virtual authentication features across different languages and all language bindings will throw an error with W3C. False is set to Chrome options and it has improved health checks and requests from non W3C locators for relay nodes and Grid and also has a link to learn more about everything included in this new release and also all the folks that contributed to this. So Ian, you can also see all the folks that help contribute to this release, so give them a big round of applause and thank them for all they do for the automation community. If you're like me, you learn from examples, so here's a great resource that shows you a boilerplate code or a way to demonstrate the usage of modern stacks put together and how they work and how you can get started with Node JS, Playwright, GitHub Actions and Foresight. Check it out so this is by Barack and he talks about the reason why he wrote this article. Basically the tech Stack market is expanding more and more and he believes that seeing everything in action is the easiest way to see the benefits. So he he decided to create this article with a combination of next JS playwright, GitHub actions and foresight to create an end to end stack for a web application. All the external tooling is free and therefore you don't need to pay anything. It goes over how to set up a to do app, goes over how to set up playwright, how to write an end to end test, how to create a junit report, how to configure your GitHub actions, how to configure foresight. Thank you Barack for this and definitely I think it's a must look at resource for sure. Next up, Performance Insight Reliability News so in a previous news show we went over web test and some of the cool features of it. Well they just introduced a new recorder Chrome extension that's going to help you with doing even more with web tests. So let's see what that can do for you. Once again, this is from Tim and it goes over what the Chrome Recorded Multi step test does. So what's really cool about this is that it allows you to measure user journeys in a site that enables you to see what the full experience of a critical flow is in your site, but it also gives you the ability to record and test interactions, making it simpler to test what the performance of your site is after the initial load. And this article goes over how to use the extension to get the most out of it. Definitely a cool new feature that I think everyone should know about. So definitely check it out and let me know what you think Want a Performance Engineering Masterclass? Well, this next resource might be just for you and it is on Performance Engineering Masterclass for Optimizing Distributed Systems and what to Expect. This is by Peter Corless and what I think is cool is that it's going to be kind of a joint partnership between K6, which is one of the go to coding type performance solutions out there, Dynatrace, which is one of the premier monitoring solutions and sycla. And the reason why this is important is, you know, performance optimization for large distributed systems is usually a multivariant problem and it's really hard to get a handle on all the different moving pieces, combining aspects of underlying hardware and network tuning operations systems and finding which layers of virtualization application architecture are causing you issues. This Masterclass is actually going to go over how you can optimize your team's pipelines to process for continuous performance, how to define, validate and visualize SLOs across your distributed systems and how to diagnose and fix subpar distributed database performance using observability methods. So I just thought this really cool resource that I'm interested in and I assume that you'd be interested as well. I'm definitely going to register for this and hope to see you there. Do you use Kubernetes or do you develop microservices? If so, you may check out or really dig this new API type of open source project I just stumbled across. So this comes your way via Leonard and it's open source tool he recently discovered called misu which allows you to tap into live API communications between deployed services. And I really like this tagline think Wireshark but built for kubernetes with multi protocol and TLS support and even better it is free. So this is going to help you troubleshoot and debug your APIs in Kubernetes. So if you like open source, if you use kubernetes, if you use microservices, this is a must try free resource and you can check it out in the first comment down below. Next up, Security News and once again I missed a Black Hat conference that went on in Las Vegas last week, but I did find a few interesting articles that touch upon some things that were announced at that event. The first one is a pen testing tool that aims to keep the fun in hacking. So this is an article based on the latest version of Attck Forge report gen DevSecOps. If you don't know, ATTCK Forge is a pen test management and collaboration platform created to facilitate security testing across large and small organizations. So this year's offering Report Gen includes new features designed to remove, according to this article, the most loathed part of pen testing, which is reporting. And one of the main reasons why is that reporting is highly time consuming and could take out all the fun of being a hacker. So this was designed to help actually alleviate that problem with some new features that helps you and your whole team with reporting. And another cool development at Black Hat USA 2022 was that crest shared a Quality Assurance Verification Standard to help you improve application security testing. So this standard is based on the open Source framework defined by owasp. The OWASP Verification Standard measures an organization's ability to execute and deliver assessments related to Level 1 and Level 2 of the OWASP Application Security Verification Standard. Their goal is to provide a consistent methodology for accrediting companies that provide application security testing services for links of everything of value we covered in this 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 awesome sponsor applitools free account offer and discover how to take your automation testing to the next level. Leveraging Visual AI so that's it for this episode of the Test Guild News Show. I'm Joe. My mission is to help you succeed in creating end to end full stack pipeline automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.