Sideways Test Pyramid, WebDriver Visual Testing and More TGNS115

What is the Sideways Test Pyramid? In Testing? Have you seen the latest WebDriver IO feature that allows developers and testers to easily verify web page content and layouts? And what skills should you add to your toolkit after this recent announcement of $13 billion investment in this area? Find out in this episode of the Test Skill News show for the week of March 24th. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and let's do this before we get into it. If you haven't already, please subscribe to The Test Guild LinkedIn News Show Newsletter that I have in the link down below to never miss another episode. So first up is an experiment we're trying out at the Test Guild. What is it? Let's check it out. What we've done is we've partnered with Test Results IO and we just want to announce this collaboration that offers a bunch of benefits to users who opt in for Test Results IO plans. Now, purchasing any plan from Test Results IO not only grants access to their awesome end to end test automation tool, but it also includes a bonus and that is three five day passes to our annual Automation Guild Conference and three copies of our Automation Awesomeness ebook. And this partnership aims to really provide users with the tools and knowledge necessary to scale your end to end test automation efforts more effectively. And as you can tell, Test Results offers multiple packages that you definitely should check out that are really designed to cater to various needs features featuring benefits such as done few setup, unlimited user journeys and integration capabilities. So what you get with the five day Automation Guild pass is 40 over the shoulder video training sessions with Q and A sessions as well and two 90 minute workshops. Plus you get access to our community only Test Automation accelerator with one new interactive and premium live training session hosted by community experts each month for nine straight months from March to November. And you're also going to get an exclusive discount for Automation Guild 2025. So just another opportunity to check out another awesome tool to help you with automation and get access to the Test Guild Automation Guild Premium community as well. Take advantage of it and hope to see you at the Guild. Do you know what the Sideways Test Pyramid is? If not, let's check out this latest article. It introduces a new perspective on integration tests integration into your continuous testing pipelines and this article was written in response to Julia's inquiry about test distribution and traditionally visualized as an upright pyramid with unit tests at the base, integration tests in the middle, and end to end tests at the apex. This blog post proposes a sideways orientation to better align with the flow of continuous integration and delivery in your CICD pipelines. And this goes over why the reorientation position of unit test where it should be and also end to end tests are closer to deployment, reflecting their role in the development process. This post emphasizes that while the ideal placement of tests may vary due to your specific application and your team's needs, a common theme is that most testing should occur earlier in the pipeline to identify issues swiftly. Additionally, discussion extends to other types of tests such as performance and security, suggesting their placement based on the application's readiness at various stages. Really a fresh look at how to do testing and you definitely should check this out in the comment down below. So Boz is back in the news. He keeps showing up on my LinkedIn feed and this time it's all about an ongoing open source test automation project he's working on. He announced it on LinkedIn that this project is aimed for those looking to enhance their skills after completing video courses or tutorials and this project on GitHub is designed to equip testers and developers with an essential skills required in the current market for test automation roles. And after you complete this you can use it as a portfolio project to showcase to potential or current employees what you've learned and how your skills are with automation. And BAOZ has also included a reference project link in the README which for now features two initial dummy tests in C using NUnit, one that passes and another that fails alongside a CI definition for GitHub Actions and and this project is aimed to really expand further with detailed instructions providing valuable hands on experience for inspiring automation professionals. Also up we have an announcement from Storybook. So if you don't know, Storybook is one of the industry leaders for developing, testing and documenting UI components and it's launched its 8th edition. So Storybook 8 enhances its capabilities in testing, documentation, framework capabilities and user experience. This release, driven by contributions from 218 individuals across 8,000 commits and 700 PRs, integrates major JavaScript frameworks and work in harmony with leading design and development tools. One major announcement for Storybook E is its built in visual testing through a new add in offering experimental support for REACT server components, upgrades auto generation of controls for VUE and React, and introduces a RE architecture support for Vite. And it also says it boosts test build speed by two to four times and refreshes both desktop and mobile user interactions and REACT dependencies have been removed for non REACT projects, which addresses a common concern among developers and testers using different frameworks and is a must see in the comment down below. So speaking of visual testing, webdriver IO has a major announcement as well along these lines and so WebDriver, which is a popular open source testing framework, released a new snapshot testing feature that allows developers and testers to easily verify web page content and layouts. So the video goes over how using simple commands, testers can now capture and compare snapshots of text content, DOM elements and full page screenshots. And this streamlines test creation and maintenance. And the snapshot feature works across desktop web, mobile, mobile web and even native mobile apps on Android and iOS and integrates WebDriver's new visual regression testing service for storing and comparing screenshots. WIM highlights some best practices when using the snapshot feature, such as storing baseline images for the specific OS and browsers where tests run. He also shows how to hide dynamic web elements to avoid flaky tests, and the WebDriver team believes these enhancements will make tests more efficient for many developers and testers who rely on the framework. Do you also want to learn another way how you can streamline your front end testing? Well, I have a technique that I think a lot of testers miss out on and I'm really excited to announce it in a webinar we're presenting along with Datadog on simplifying and automating front end testing with datadog synthetic monitoring and this free training aims to address the growing complexity and resource demands of end to end testing in agile development workflows. And so our presenters, Mike, a product manager, and Bridget, a product Marketing Manager at Datadog, are going to demonstrate how their synthetic monitoring tool can expedite test creation without code. So it helps you do really cool things like simulate real user journeys and integrate synthetic tests into your CI CD pipelines for earlier issue detection. I'm really excited about this webinar because we're going to help equip you and your teams with tools that to conduct comprehensive testing across various locations, browsers, devices and network protocols, aiming for more efficient, smarter testing workflows. So if you really want to up your testing game with another approach that gives you better coverage, so register for this free webinar now in the comment down below and hope to see you there. So if you have anything to do with DevOps, you're probably wondering about what the state of platform engineering is. Well, I have a new report that's going to help with this and this is Puppet's 2024 State of DevOps report. It focuses on platform engineering and is now freely available, and this year's edition delves deeper into platform engineering, examining its definitions, benefits and practical applications within organizations. So if you really want to take a deep dive and understand more about platform Engineering's impact on DevOps, this report offers statistics, strategies and other expert recommendations that you could find. And in that comment down below so last week I went over Devin, which is being touted as the first AI software test engineer. Well, here's another company coming out what they're calling the first AI SRE engineer. So Cleric recently unveiled an autonomous AI designed to function as a site reliability engineer. And this AI can analyze thousands of system alerts simultaneously and capable of identifying and resolving complex cloud within an Average time of 5 minutes. Sound too good to be true? I don't know, but I always say try it for yourself and see if it works for you. So in our Follow the Money segment this is all about where you probably should be focusing on or adding skills in your career. And it's on security. And the reason why is the White House just released its 2023 fiscal plan which proposes 13 billion injection into the federal cybersecurity budget. The bulk of this financial boost is directly towards enhancing the capabilities of the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agencies and bolster artificial intelligence research efforts. And so for links of everything of value we covered in this news episode, heading over to that link in the comment down below. So that's it for this episode of the Test Skill new 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.