Rocking Automation, AI Synthetic Data and more TGNS46

Are you an automation testing rocker? What's the deal with the rise in synthetic data solutions? Did you know that an actively exploited Microsoft zero day flaw still has no patch? Final answers 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 Skill News show for the week of June 12th. So grab your favorite 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 Day. Next generation test automation platform powered by visual AI will help you increase quality, accelerate delivery and reduce costs with the world's most intelligent test automation platform that I know of. But seeing as believe in so create your free account now by clicking on 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 News so my friend Yan Malik just released a new version of Serenity JS is now available on NPM and brings further improvements to the actors notepad. So it also includes support for creating notepads with the initial state. Particularly useful when different screenplay actors need different data and data driven sources. It also has automatic asynchronous proxies around built in types like Set Map and others so that they accept promises and Serenity JS screenplay questions I said it many times before when I was working full time as an automation architect automation test automation engineer. Serenity was my go to framework. Really love what they do there. So thank you. Jan, do you know what a quick way is to get involved with open source projects? One way is to contribute to documentation. So here's a great opportunity for all you Selenium test automation engineers that have still been a little bit hesitant about contributing to the project. If you want to contribute to the Slam website and docs by setting up an environment but you thought it was like too much work, too much effort. Not to worry, they actually created a git pod environment that's ready to use now. So if you go to Selenium HQ GitHub IO this is a repository used to build and publish the official Selenium website. So as a quick start guide how to get involved. So I think this is a great way once I once again to get your foot in the door with an open source project and contribute to the community. And one of those ways is contributing to the documentation that's oftenly overlooked. So definitely check this out in the first link down below. So this next article on LinkedIn caught my attention just because I'm a musician. I don't know if you noticed the guitars in the background. I actually wanted to be a full time studio musician so I went to Berklee College of Music and so this article caught my attention because I found in my career, over my long career, a lot of testers that I get involved with or developers, a lot of them also have a musical background. So this post is by Dominic and he talks about the talented people he works with at TestDev Labs who I've featured on my podcast a few times. So this article just goes over why they're big fans of music and how different people in their company actually have bands or have different musical abilities that they actually have cool videos for as well as some of the music they've created. So let me know if you're automation Testing rocker as well in the comment down below. And for all you front end testing enthusiasts, I want to mention once again this great event that's about to happen next week and it is Front end Test Fest. I'm actually going to be running this behind the scenes. I'm really excited about it because we have two awesome hosts, which is Angie Jones and Cassidy Williams. Really awesome host and also some great speakers like Andrew Knight, Maria Drake and Gleb, just to mention a few. And it's a free event that's taking place once again next week. So so if you have anything to do with front end testing, you definitely want to register for that event for sure and I'll see you there. All right, so a trend I've been hearing more about in 2022, which I'll probably highlight in my top trends for 2023, is synthetic data. AI driven synthetic data. I've been hearing a lot of new companies coming out the past few months talking about this, so this next article caught my attention. How Synthetic Data is About to Transform Artificial Intelligence so synthetic data has been around, especially if you've been in the performance testing space, but this article points out how it's now poised to upend the entire value chain and technology stack for artificial intelligence with immense economic implications. And as you know, data is the livelihood of modern artificial intelligence. And getting the data right, especially in testing, is one of the most important and most challenging part of building a powerful test suite that leverages AI. And so I actually ran an event last week and one of the speakers was from the company Tonic AI. So it was funny to actually find this article yesterday without even knowing that they were featured in it. And Tonic AI is one of the new startups that I've learned more about that offer tools for synthetically generated textual data. And one of the primary use cases is for software testing and developers rather than for building machine learning models. So I think it's a great time to get more involved in synthetic data if you haven't already, because I think it's really going to help your automation testing efforts going forward in the coming years. So often as an automation tester, a lot of times you're worried about the framework, the development of the test, running the test. A lot of times what's not covered is some metrics and ways you can actually monitor your end to end automation testing solutions. And that's where this next article comes in. So once again it's a real world example of how a company is implementing automation and what I really like about it is how they talk about how test automation systems complexity introduced many daily challenges that if not handled properly can significantly prolong your CI CD pipelines and thus reducing developers velocity and eventually hurting the developer experience, which I think everyone has experience. So that's why one of the top priorities is to make the system as performable as possible. And by performable they mean being faster, stable and more reliable. And monitoring is one of the many tools they use to achieve that goal. And this article goes over how they achieve that goal using monitoring, some of the key metrics they use to help push this forward, how they implemented it, and then some key takeaways. So definitely another must read and you can check it out in the first comment down below. Next up, performance and cyber liability news. So this next segment is a money segment and it's all how Carlogic closes 142 million Series D for the full stack observability platform. So I've never heard of Carlogic, so I had to click on the link and basically they help companies monitor their system. They log into a client system and collect data like software logs and other data that provides information on the performance of the hardware and they check how long it takes for transactions to complete and they check every stage and identify abnormal activity or any hacks into their environment. And this is a growing trend obviously observability. A lot of tools are coming on the space, a lot of money's being thrown at it. So definitely something to be more aware of in the coming year for sure. So this next article from Leandro Melendez is a blast from the past because I haven't heard about Rendezvous in a long time. Pretty much since my Loadrunner days. Here's my loadrunner for the Web 7o student workbook, which covers Rendezvous and other things. Definitely great resource for me. But this is an updated twist on rendezvous using K6. And if you don't know Rendezvous is a function that stops the virtual users when they reach the instruction in the script, and the function makes them wait until more virtual users get to that step or a timer runs out. Then everyone who reaches that point will execute the next instruction simultaneously. So it may sound complex, but Leandro and Mark Tomlinson break this down on how Rendezvous are used in in action and especially how you can work with rendezvous within K6. So thank you Leandro for making me having a blast from the past and definitely check out this article and check out this functionality within K6. Next up, security News and I think this next article is something everyone needs to be aware of and that is how an actively exploited Microsoft zero day flaw still has no patch. And the reason why this is important to know as a tester or as a software engineer is that researchers warned last weekend that this floor in the Microsoft Support Diagnostic tool could be exploited using malicious Word documents to remotely take control of a target device. But it really gets serious because by Tuesday, United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has warned that a remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability. As of yet, Microsoft has not announced when they're going to patch it. So definitely something you should be aware of. And speaking of the government, have you seen the Open Source Software Security Mobilization Plan that was put together by the Linux foundation and the US Government? This was actually created during the Open Source Software Summit in Washington D.C. may 12th 13th and their goal was to reach a consensus on high impact actions to take to improve resilience and security of opensoft software. So if you click on this plan, you don't need to register, you just click on it. You can download the article and it goes over a bunch of things like the goal and the areas you should be focusing in on to reach these goals. So for links to 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 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 ED and Full Stack Pipeline automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.