Selenium 4 Facebook & Twitch Hack TGNS17

Want to know some key insights around API testing? Why did Facebook go down for almost a whole day and did you hear about the huge Twitch hack? Find out the answers to these and all other full stack end to end automation, performance, security and DevOps testing topics in this episode of the Test Guild News show for the week of October 10th. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and let's do this. Also a big shout out to applitools. This episode of the Test Guild News show was actually sponsored by the awesome folks at applitools. If you don't know, applitools is the next generation test automation platform for visual AI. It helps increase quality, accelerate delivery and reduce costs with the most intelligent test automation platform. I could vouch for this myself. I've actually used this at a large enterprise company and had unbelievable results. So seeing is believing though. So help support the show by clicking on the link down below to create a free account. Now also make sure to like and comment down below. This helps support the show and also tell the algorithm to help spread automation awesomeness to the masses. First up, Automation News. Also speaking of applitools, make sure to check out their white paper on disrupting the economics of testing through AI. This is a really great resource that goes over many things, but some highlights that they point out is why is the cost of quality control out of control, the critical pain points faced by modern software development teams, and five ways artificial intelligence and machine learning can help you today. Definitely check it out. The second and last release candidate for Selenium 4 is now out. It actually was shipped with all the language bindings for.net Java, Python, Ruby and JavaScript. So definitely give it a go and try it out if you haven't already. So on the show we've been hearing a lot about codeless or low code automation solutions and this next news item caught my attention. It's a series of a funding going to a company I just heard about called I think it's Audify. So Audify is another no code AI powered software testing automation platform that just raised $10 million in series A funding. And speaking about Codeless, I don't know if you ever looked in LinkedIn comments, but a lot of times you have a lot of awesome experts actually commenting on other people's posts that then lead you to other information that you didn't know about. And this is what happened to me when I was looking at both Codeless automation, I came across this post and a comment by Boz that actually I think Illuminates some areas where people may be confused about what is codeless or debating if codeless is even automation or is it even worthwhile? Someone posts about codeless automation, the benefits of it, and in the comments I noticed Boz said, you say codeless, I say abstraction layer. So potato, potato, tomato, tomato. For Boz, he calls it abstraction layer. I'll have a link to Boz's full blog post on Colas automation and why he likes to rather think of it as an abstraction layer. And just a lot of good insight here on how you can get your head around what is codeless, what does it mean by codeless and pros and cons of codeless, and how thinking about as an abstraction layer may be more beneficial. Also, SmartBear just released its 2020 State of Software Quality API survey results with some interesting insights around API testing and some key insights that they highlight is that a majority of API practitioners operate in multi protocol landsc. Of those surveyed, 57 state they use three or more protocols within their organizations. Developers are also increasingly involved in testing and taking on more testing responsibilities, with close to 60% reporting that they are directly involved in API testing. Also, ease of use was reported as being the top factor of driving API tool choice and the biggest obstacle to ensuring quality of APIs as well as API documentation is an increased demand for speed and delivery. So check out the link for this survey down below because it goes into detail to a whole bunch of other topics and why they bubbled up those particular insights as key things that you should take away from this report. Another aspect of automation that's often overlooked in software development is actually automation or treating infrastructure as code. And so one popular technology that's used to help you do that is Terraform and have a really good medium post that goes into detail on this as well. And this talks about how to use integration testing Using Terraform Test, Saroon breaks down some prerequisites for getting started, test for Terraform modules, how to run test, and a whole lot more. So definitely check that out as well. Also, another hot topic we've been talking about as well is cloud and cloud automation. So VM just had announcement of announcing the availability of VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost and I like how this article points out how modern IT infrastructure is one of the core pillars of digital transformation strategies in the public. Cloud has been a digital transformation enabler for organizations because of several benefits such as elasticity on demand, scalability, agility, innovation, and reduced operational overhead, to name a few. So just another reason why I think automation should be expanded to incorporate and embrace other forms of automation, including infrastructure and cloud based technologies. Next up, performance and site reliability News all right, probably the biggest news item of the week has been the outage of Facebook and Instagram. People were panicking, it was down for almost a day. So why did it happen? A lot of people asking was it a hack could have been prevented? So I found a really Great article on LinkedIn that was posted by Tammy and Timmy. Also post an article to a really detailed a breakdown of what happened, why it happened and if it could have been prevented. So thank you Tammy for posting this in LinkedIn if you click on this link. So the article that Tammy referenced is a really deep dive into what happened for the Facebook outage. So it has a really good breakdown step by step of what happened and how they eventually resolved it. I thought was even more enlightening. Was Tammy's discussion going on on do you think this could have been prevented? Could SREs have helped in this? And survey results say that yes, it could have been prevented, 27% say no. But then once again as I mentioned with the other comments on LinkedIn, if you dive into the comments, Timmy adds further insight into what other people are saying and helps illuminate how she thinks it could have been prevented. Or Elisa found out or catched earlier or resolved earlier. So a lot of good stuff going on there. So definitely check it out. And also I think I said it before but definitely give Tammy Afollo. She's one of the go to resources for me for civilia building engineering and especially chaos engineering. And speaking of code to resources, Nicole Vanderhoeven is back on the news with another awesome resource around performance testing that you definitely need to check out. This is on how to plan a load test. Definitely check out the video. Really good insight around all things performance related topics, so definitely give her a follow as well. Another news item that caught my attention is something I never heard about before, but the creators of the Fluent project actually announced a cloud software solution for what they're calling the first mild data observability platform for enterprises. So I thought I'd share with you because I've never heard of it before so maybe it's something that would benefit you. So observability actually is a huge trend I've been seeing this year, so I'm seeing a lot of tools coming out. This is just another example. And so this just talks about how you can ensure that users are successful in their first mile of their observability journey and help scale to manage data across thousands of servers per day. And this solution is available to help with that. So it looked like another cool piece of technology that we should know about. Since I said observability is a hot trend and these types of tools are probably something we should learn more about as well. And finally, security news. And this next news item may be just as big, if not bigger than the Facebook one we just talked about. And that is Twitch is having security issues. So a lot of interesting quotes in this particular article. One of them is reading of a data breach that includes the entire source code including unreleased software, SDKs, financial reports and internal red teaming tools will send a shudder down the spine of any hardcore infosec professional. And the first question in everyone's mind has to be how on earth did someone do this? They sum up the article basically by saying whatever Twitch was doing for application security, they need to redouble their efforts because anyone can run a static analysis, interactive analysis, fuzzing and other application security testing tools and Twitch needs to push their application security to the next level to find and fix invulnerabilities before anyone else could find them. So interesting quote there though, even though you may have in place automation tools to help you do scans and help find low hanging fruit that your security efforts need to be much more encompassing than this and you definitely need to be invested in your infosec teams needs to be expanded for a lot of these companies because exploits like this will sink your company and your brand. So just a cautionary tale for any other company out there if they're not heavily investing in their security efforts. So that's it for this episode of the Test Skill News show. Make sure to help support the show by clicking the links down below and make sure to check out aplitools and visual AI. Definitely check it out if you haven't looked at it yet and click on the link down below to create a free account now so you can get up and running to see how AI and visual testing can help really find bugs that you would not find any way else without using a technology like applitools. Once again, I'm Joe and my mission is to help you succeed with creating end to end full stack end to end automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good cheers.