Playwright Cypress Fight, Microservices, Observability and more TGNS57

Who would win a fight between Cypress or Playwright? Need an innovative microservice testing strategy? And what is the next frontier for observability? Find out 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 September 4th. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or 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 visual AI validation testing platform that's a must for any automation project. But don't miss your opportunity now to create a free account by checking out their free account offer in the first link in the comment down below. And while you're there, why not leave a comment, subscribe, and get alerted every time I release a new episode. First up, Automation News. So, as you know, today, two of the top automation frameworks out there are Playwright and Cypress. But which is better? Well, you may have noticed a few months ago we went over a webinar that actually pitted them face to face head to head with Andy and Philip. But they're back to jump in the ring again to go over a new round of what is better, Cypress or Playwright. Check it out. So last time Playwright seemed to have won the battle. So you definitely want to join and check out this rematch. They're gonna actually go deeper into small coding snippets that are gonna go head to head with a full test automation project covering live web app testing. So it's going to be competing for your vote. So you get to judge which is better based on these different snippet kind of rounds. And Beth Marshall is going to be the impartial, inquisitive quality champion. So really fun event that you definitely can participate in as well. And I think you'll get a lot of benefit out of it. So definitely check that out in the first comment down below. So for automation frameworks, you know, Playwright and Cypress seem to be some of the most popular ones. But if you're doing API testing, another popular framework is Postman. So there's actually a new version that is being announced called postman version 10 that's coming out soon. Let's see what it includes. So this comes your way via Rebecca, who works at Postman. So the first new feature that's pointed out is the new Postman CLI to automated testing. The second one is native git support. The third is new features to enable better API security and governance. They also have a partner workspace that they're rolling out and also support for grpc. So so this is just five of many new features that are going to be rolled out if you want to see it. Definitely. I recommend you check this out once again. All these links will be in the first comment down below. So another API feature that a lot of folks ask me about is how do I test or do contract testing? Well, one of the go to platforms has been Pact Flow and I don't know how to miss this, but a few weeks ago it looks like Smart Beer actually just acquired Pac Flow. So I found this announcement from Andrew who works at SmartBear. If you don't know, PacFlow is a complete contract testing platform and it's now part of the Smart Bear family. So it's really cool. They're actually going to have a webinar to learn how to apply contract testing to your design first API development workflows. So just a great resource to know about and a great tool and it's joining a great company. So congratulations and definitely check it out if you haven't tried it before. So I actually came across a few new free tools that I didn't know about before. The first one is called Test Flowcharts. This was announced by the creator of saihee Pro. I don't know if you know saihee, but it's been around for a while. It's an automation framework that's been very popular. So what caught my attention is they just introduced a new tool called Test Flowcharts, which is a free tool that helps you to visualize and build your test flows, automate and execute them 99% with no code. Interesting concept, but does it do what it says it does? Well, there's a link in here to Flowchart. So they say that the Test Flowchart offers a disruptive approach to test automation and completely redefines the way test automation is designed and executed. So it really looks interesting. Haven't tried it myself, but I'd highly recommend you try it out and then let me know what you think about it in the comments down below. If you think it really is a disruptive new approach that a lot of people will find benefit from. So the other free tool that caught my attention is all about how to test desktop applications because I'm always looking for things to automate other than browsers because in a end to end workflow you usually have to deal with all kinds of technologies. So here's one solution that's going to help you for free Test Desktop Applications so this is a free desktop application automation testing tool that was developed to overcome the many challenges and limitations that are present and many other tools. With the launch of this tool you could say goodbye to tools that have poor reliability, slow execution speed, complex setup processes and no active support and lack of support for Java and Windows 11. They've addressed this all supposedly in this new tool and this actually goes over how to get started with some examples of interacting with all kinds of different Windows type of elements. So it looks like a very cool initiative and once again haven't tried it myself yet. But if you have, if you do, highly recommend you leave your opinions in that comment down below. Let everyone here know what you thought of it. So besides getting excited about new tools, I also love seeing real world examples of how other companies have succeeded with their software testing initiatives. So here's one that goes over how a company actually rolls out microservice testing in their strategy for doing so. And Onat talks about how his company their microservice testing strategy allowed them to reduce QA efforts and optimize scenarios to assure flawless experience. And so they actually share the strategies they use to build a unified and responsive aircraft seat map for different self service touchpoints, which I thought was really cool as well. And this article is just part one of how they actually accomplished that. So another awesome real world example. I highly recommend you give this a read. Alright, so another exciting announcement is that Cypress just released a new version. What's really cool about this is they released a new feature a few months ago or half like maybe six months ago called Cypress Studio and then they no longer made it available but now it's available again. So if you don't know, Cypress Studio provides a visual way to actually generate tests with Cypress by recording interactions and gets the application under test. It also adds Civiti component testing support. Also the new runs and average duration columns in the specs list now provide actions when hovering over to assist the process of connecting the project to the Cypress Dashboard Angular component testing updates for custom configurations and the Cypress clock now is set to a new time using the Set System time function. It also has some performance updates and bug fixes as well. So just another great new release. If you're not using Cypress or you haven't updated yet, I highly recommend you do and check out the Cypress Studio so we talk about a lot of different frameworks on this show. One framework that doesn't seem to get a lot of love for some reason is Robot framework. So I was really excited to see this next article on robot framework and a really interesting user case that it was used for for a certain kind of testing that was difficult to do with any other framework. Robot framework has all these modules you can use to create all kinds of types of testing well beyond just a web browser. And here's one cool example, so let's check it out. So this is actually a company that makes physical actuators and they needed a way to test it and this goes over how they actually use robot framework to accomplish it. So this article dives into what kind of test it was needed, how robot framework allowed them to achieve that testing and what they did to actually make it run successfully. So really cool use of robot framework. So if you haven't used robot framework, if you have to do these types of testing outside just a browser, I highly recommend you check out the robot framework. Next up, Performance Insight Reliability News so I had a didn't find many news items on performance or security, but I did find one for each. So this first one is around performance testing and observability which has been a hot trend within performance engineering. And this is all about how Data ownership with OpenTelemetry is going to be even bigger in the years to come and how proprietary agents only give you the most basic data out of the box and true observability still requires manual instrumentation work. So it talks a little bit about what is observability, what is the data key, why you should care about ownership of the data and how you can own your own data as well, along with why OpenTelemetry specifically can help in this area and then what's next. So definitely an interesting read. Highly recommend you check this out. Last up Security Testing News so Traceable AI I believe I covered them maybe a month or so ago. Traceable AI just announced that their testing solution is now generally available to enable any API in pre production to be tested for vulnerabilities, accuracy, reliability and overall security. And I definitely agree with Sanjay's quote here that whether an API is in the development cycle or it's in production being accessed by thousands of users. And Traceable API security platform protects companies most vulnerable attack vectors from threats at every juncture and there's a link to learn more how you can prevent different types of breaches using this particular solution. So definitely a worthwhile tool to check out if you have anything to do with security. You definitely should have these type of scans as part of your CICD pipelines for links of everything of value we covered in this news episode? Head on over to 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 and 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.