Mainframe Automation Still a Thing?TGNS47

Do you want to scale your automation and have your development teams become more productive and ship code more frequently? Are you making some common performance mistakes and do you use Travis CI? If so, you might be at risk. Final answer to these and all other End to end full pipeline DevOps automation testing, performance testing and security testing in 10 minutes or less in this episode of the Test Guild News show for the week of June 19th. Grab your favorite cup of coffee, tea and let's do this. This episode of the Test Skill New show is sponsored by the awesome folks at applitools. Applitools is a next generation test automation platform that's powered by visual AI which helps you increase quality, accelerate delivery and reduce costs with the world's most intelligent test automation platform. But seeing is believing. So create your free account now by clicking in the link in the first comment down below. While you're there, why not leave a comment section, subscribe and get alerted every time I release a new episode. First up, Automation News so I always love learning about new tools. So this next announcement brought my attention to a new AI based technology that may help you with your test automation. So on LinkedIn I noticed this post by Chris saying that his company has been invited to join Y Combinator. I didn't know about DevTools, so I went to DevTools AI and noticed it was a smart driver that learns from your tests so you don't have to update them. So the way it works is smart driver wraps your existing test in two lines of code and then what it does it learns from your test so when the DOM changes they still find the right elements. So it has some cool smart feature functionality and it helps reduce maintenance. Currently I think it's available for free, so definitely a worthwhile thing to check out for sure. So whenever I see folks that have to automate applications like Salesforce, a lot of times it's using either a vendor based tool, they're trying to use Selenium. But this is the first time I actually saw someone post how to test a Salesforce front end using Playwright. So Jay posts a blog that talks about how they created two tests with the basic framework using Playwright that they were able to leverage to test Salesforce front end application testing. There's even a GitHub repo that you can check out and the article just goes over some basics of what is Salesforce, what is Lightning in Salesforce and how they incorporated Playwright, interact with it, how they handle things like locators, what the test output look like and some code samples as well so definitely a worthwhile read if you do any sort of Salesforce testing or you just want to see or to see how Playwright can use can be used to test these package based applications like Salesforce. So thank you Jay for this post and definitely check it out in the first comment down below. So speaking of Salesforce, another popular tool that a lot of folks use is Provar. So I noticed another post by Tristan talking about they just released Test Manager, which is their new solution for all your Salesforce testing needs and it includes things like importing third party test results in junit and Testng format, has Jira integration, Salesforce DevOps center integration, Apex Unit Test Results Import, has support for unit testing, manual testing, automated testing, exploratory testing and customizable dashboards. And there's a link to learn even more about this new solution. So a lot of good news for people that need to test Salesforce in this episode, so definitely check this out as well. Do you need to still test mainframes or do you know that mainframes are still being leveraged to do new things like hybrid platforms for hybrid cloud type of implementations? So you definitely need to check out this next article. So Rosalind posted a link to how to spin up and down Z OS for early development and test, and with all these options available, there's no reason developers should not be able to isolate early innovation and experimentation. And there's a link for more information on the high performance and flexibility of IBM's virtual dev and tests for ZOs for accelerating development and testing or Z O S applications. So believe it or not, there's still a lot of great innovations going on in these type of technologies. And one of my favorite open source contributors, Manoj Kumar, is back in the news. For one, he actually has a new role as VP of developer relations at LambdaTest. And he just posted a new release of Test Manager that's created by LambdaTest that helps you scale quicker your testing efforts. And it just goes over how TAs, which is their test at scale solution, allows you to handle flaky test management performance metrics of your test, orchestrating test results under one dashboard and getting fast feedback based on smart test selection. And it's open source and now available on product hunt. So TAS was created because development teams usually don't know what subset of test cases will impact the latest code changes. Hence teams keep executing all the tests every time and every build, which is pointless and just leads to clogged pipelines. I definitely agree, and I think technologies like this can help you really pinpoint and scale down your test suite to really know that when Code A is checked in that this subset of tests go against that specific check in and can verify whether or not it broke anything in your build. So definitely something to check out Open source and thank you Manoj for this announcement. And obviously another way to scale your automation is to learn some best practices on testing your applications, especially your front end applications. So I just want to give you a quick reminder that Front End Test Fest is happening this week. This Thursday, definitely check it out. So I mentioned it a few times, but once again it's a free online event that goes over trends, tools and frameworks around front end testing, accessibility testing, UX research component testing, end to end testing and it has the one and only Angie Jones as one of the hosts for this event with a lot of awesome speakers. So definitely if you haven't registered yet, here's your last chance to do so now by clicking on that link down below. So I don't know how many of you follow Paul Grossman, but on all the social media platforms he's been posting about test rigor and being at Twilio. So I was excited to see this latest video that he created on using Testrigger in Twilo, using an iPhone demo, using plain English to create his automation. So really not a lot of things to see here. It's just a link to his video but a lot of cool. So just another cool way of doing automation using Testrigger and Twilio that I thought you may want to know more about. So thank you Paul for all you do and all your contributions to the community. So we talked a lot in this episode so far about Salesforce Automation, but how about if you need to test auto Oracle based package based applications? So I came across this another event that you should definitely check out that features Oracle Test Automation and some best practices on how to tackle it as well. So by the folks at Excel Queue, it's a event talking about digital assurance in the world of no code apps and this features Oracle Test Automation has some thought leaders in the space and it'll be hosted by yours truly. So if you do any sort of article based test automation I think this is a must attend event and you can check it out by clicking in the link in the first comment down below to learn more and register and hope to see you there. Next up, performance testing and site reliability news. So this next post is a link to a slide deck for a talk that Paul Cavano recently did on performance mistakes at the Web Direction Lazy Load conference and his talk covered common mistakes he's seen sites make when enabling web performance features as well as HTTP archive data to show how common they actually are. So obviously with performance testing, especially front end performance testing, learning more about ways you can make your apps or your front end web apps more performant is definitely a must. So here's a resource that you can check out to learn more as well. Also this week Grafana Labs announced an open source developer friendly incident response response tool that all USRE geeks should definitely check out. This open source tool helps you collect and analyze alerts from multiple monitoring systems. It does on call rotation based on schedules, automatic escalations and phone calls, sms, slack and telegraph notification. So definitely another cool tool from Grafana Labs. It's open source. Check it out, let me know what you think. Last up Security News do you use Travis CI? If so, you definitely want to stick around to hear more about this. So Unpatch Travis CI API bug exposes thousands of secret user access tokens and this article goes over how this bug effectively allowed threat actors to breach cloud infrastructures making unauthorized code changes and initiate supply chain attacks. And more than 707 million logs of free tier users are available which can easily extract tokens, secrets and other credentials associated with popular cloud service providers such as GitHub, AWS and Docker Hub. And the logs go way back to January 2013 all the way up to May 2022. So if you use Travis CI you definitely should check this out to learn more. And for links of everything 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 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 at creating end to end full stack pipeline automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good Cheers.