Security Testing Protections, Feature Flags and More TGNS44

How do you handle flaky tests at scale? Have you seen the Open Feature feature Flag Project? And what does the US Government security testing protections mean for enterprises? Find out the 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 Guild News show for the week of May 22nd. So grab your favorite cup of coffee and 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 next generation test automation platform powered by visual AI which helps you increase quality, accelerate delivery and reduce costs. What I think is the world's most intelligent test automation platform. But I understand seeing is believing. So create your free account now by clicking on the Free Account Offer 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 Patrick Darning is back on the show with a new version of his screenplay Playwright for Playwright Project and he just released version 0.20 which now includes REST API interactions and if you missed the previous episode where we covered this library, the screenplay Playwright is a JavaScript implementation of the screenplay pattern. It's a library that helps you write better interactions for better automation. Interactions are units of behavior and every test case is essentially a sequence of interactions. I've spoken to a lot of folks over the years that have used the screenplay pattern. They swear by it, so definitely check this out if you haven't already. So I'm always looking for real world case studies and how people do automation at their companies. And this next article is by Gleb, who's probably one of the main contributors to Cypress on how they run mobile web browser tests at his company. And as I mentioned, this is a really great in depth article on the approach he takes to mobile browser testing. How you can configure Cypress to help with mobile test, how to get fast feedback, how to add mobile specific steps and next steps. So if you do anything with Cypress, this is a must read article which you can find in the first comment down below. So thank you Gleb for that. And speaking of real world scenarios, how does a large company like Slack handle flaky tests? Well, you're in for a treat. I don't know how I missed this article, it was released last month. But it's how they actually handle flaky tests at scale at Slack. And once again it's a pretty in depth article on what it looked like before they handled flaky test and just step by step on how they actually fix the problem. They walk you through their automation journey. They have multiple approaches that they go over in this article and the impacts of what they did after refactoring. So if you have flaky tests, and I'm sure you do, this is definitely one the of like a teachable moment for you to learn how another company handled it as well and what you can learn from that. So if you use Cypress and you have to do any type of pack testing, I have a special plugin for you that you should definitely check out and this is from the folks at PacFlow. They have a new way to test your UI for PAC Flow users with the Pact Cypress adapter, which is now available in the Cypress Plugin directory and this adapter gives you simple commands to generate Pact contracts from your existing Cypress test maintained by the Pact Flow team. So if you use Pac Flow, definitely check out that adapter and let me know how it works for you. So there's been a lot of hype around this next event. I mentioned it a few weeks ago was one of the top clicked on article, so if you haven't registered already, it's your last chance to do so. It's happening this week and it is a webinar on Cypress vs. Playwright. Let the code speak and it's going to be 10 rounds of automation awesomeness are going to go over comparing the two as they handle API requests, inline frames, alerts, page objects and a bunch more with 2 of the industry leaders in Test automation. We have Philip who is leading the charge representing Cypress, and we have the one and only Andrew Knight, the automation panda handling Playwright who wins. Register down below to find out. And speaking of Playwright, they just released version 1.22. It's like the second release I've seen from them in the past two weeks. So it's a good sign. A lot of people are more interested in Playwright and investing in Playwright and it looks like a solution that the team is keeping up on and constant improving. And this one includes new features like selectors update, web first screenshot assertions, component test preview, PyTest, CodeGen and Playwright for Java, support for ARM64 and a bunch more. So I highly recommend always checking out the latest versions of Playwright. So once again give that a try and see if it has new features that could definitely help you with the Playwright automation. Next up, performance and site reliability news. So this is a money announcement Commodore raises 42 million to build a continuous, reliable platform for Kubernetes. I didn't know what Comodar was, so it looks like it's an automated approach to incident resolution, accelerating response times. Reduce MTTR empowers dev teams to resolve issues efficiently and independently, and the platform ingests millions of Kubernetes events each day that breaks the key learnings directly into the platform. And as the article mentions, Kubernetes is the most popular project within the cloud native cloud foundation. And if you're not familiar with it, you definitely should become more familiar with Kubernetes because I think it's a skill everyone's going to need to know that that are in the software development software testing space. And if you're an SRE have you heard what caused the Elastin cloud outage that happened recently? This article goes over an update by the Atlassian team on the outage that affected many of their customers. Once again, it's great to read these type of reports, see what happens, what they did to resolve it, and what key takeaways you can use to implement at your company to avoid similar issues. And you probably have heard of open telemetry, but have you heard about the Open Feature Feature Flag project? I haven't until I read this recent article. It's actually a project led by the folks at Dynatrace, and as a software tester software developer, you probably know that feature flags have emerged as a key enabler for effective continuous software delivery DevOps or site reliability engineering practices which enable developers to toggle certain application features on and off at runtime without deploying new code in Open Future aims to provide a unified API and SDK starting with Java, and this is going to allow developers to have a consistent standard for feature flags and then layer on their favorite tool, be it launchdocly, optimizely, or other popular feature management options. So definitely an awesome initiative by Dynatrace and I think it's a great standard to have in place as well. And if you're into free testing education, especially around performance testing, blazemeter just made the following announcement. Blazemeter Testing University is now up and running and it covers things like JMeter, DevOps, and open source and test automation certification courses. And what I really like about this university is it teaches things like JMETER and also blazemeter, how it helps performance testing, and a whole bunch of other topics I think you're going to find value from. So if you haven't already checked it out, definitely check it out in that first link down below. Next up, Security News. So if you're an ethical hacker or you do a lot of research in the security space, this next announcement is what the US Government security testing protection means for enterprises. And it looks like the Department of Justice released a new policy announcing that good faith security research will no longer be charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. And this is great news because well intentioned researchers have always been at risk due to the overly broad interpretation of the sfaa. So definitely some awesome news for security testers. Also, Security News Google announced its aim to share its vetted open source ecosystem with the world. So developers who want to benefit from Google security efforts will soon be able to subscribe to a service that allows developers to use open source components that they know have been vetted into and patch for security issues by Google's developers. And the idea is to have a curated version and the article goes over what they do to vet each of these open source projects. They go over scanning, fuzzing and checking on 1,000 cores. And they recognize that most organizations don't have the resources or expertise to construct and operate such a comprehensive program. And this should be available by third quarter of 2022. It's another great initiative by Google. I don't know how much it's going to be, but it seems like a subscription we're having for sure. 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. So that's it for this episode of the Test Guild new 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.