Test Accessibility Event, Playwright Github Actions, Performance Testing LLM and More TGNS137

Have you seen the virtual event dedicated to digital accessibility for QA and testers? How do you run only Playwright tests that have changed in a GitHub Actions workflow? And why should you care about risk management as a software tester? Find out on this episode of the Test Skill News show for the week of September 29th. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and let's do this. First up is all about digital accessibility and how testers have an awesome resource to learn more about it. So digital accessibility is a critical yet often overlooked aspect of software development. With 1.3 billion people worldwide living with disabilities and a market worth 13 trillion in annual disposable income, failing to prioritize accessibility excludes a large segment of users and results in missed revenue opportunities. And that's why I was excited to see how Quality Forge 2024, an online event taking place on October 10, aims to address this gap. This conference provides insights from QA engineers, executives and industry leaders on the importance of creating accessible digital solutions. So attendees will gain practical tips, hear real world stories, and understand how improving accessibility isn't just about compliance, but also making technology exclusive and usable for everyone. And as you know, digital accessibility is not optional and it's a business necessity. And as testers, ensuring that your applications are accessible to all users can significantly impact user experience and revenue. And that's why you should definitely register now for this must attend event. All you need to do is head on over to Test Guild Me testdev or click on that link down below. Hope to see you there. And speaking of accessibility, I just found this announcement by Sebastian who just made an update to his Cypress accessibility plugin Wick Alley, and this new version fixes issues in creating HTML reports. And if you don't know this is an open source Cypress plugin for performing configurable accessibility tests using Axe with flawless integration in Cypress, with violations shown graphically on the web page and in the Cypress log, and generating HTML documents with violation details and screenshots. Just another tool you should know about. Especially if you're doing anything with accessibility in Cypress. Definitely check it out, Let me know your thoughts. And besides accessibility, I think another overlooked area in testing is risk management. So that's why I was really excited to see this next article from testing expert Jean Ann Harrison on LinkedIn about an article she wrote that delves into the significant role that software testers should play with risk management and with an emphasis on identifying both potential and actual issues within a software system, and with an emphasis on identifying both potential and actual issues within a software system. This article outlines how testers are increasingly pivotal in managing and mitigating risk by executing comprehensive testing processes. Testers not only ensure the quality and reliability of software, but also anticipate possible failures and vulnerabilities that could jeopardize the project success and key elements highlighted in this article include the necessity for testers to comprehend industry specific risk, the utilization of robust testing strategies and the coordination with other stakeholders to maintain vigilance over emerging threats and also goes over how testers act and as the guardian of software integrity, aiming to preempt setbacks that could lead to costly delays or malfunctions. And like I said, I think this is an overlooked area, something you should definitely dive into more. And you can learn more about it by looking at the link in detail down below. How do you use playwright with GitHub Actions? Well, in a recent blog post by Butch, the spotlight is on the latest feature introduced in playwright version 1.46. The update brings an enhancement that is set to streamline the testing process significantly, and this new feature allows developers to run only Playwright tests that have changed in a GitHub's actions workflow when submitting a pull request. And this cool feature promises to save both time and resources by targeting only in the modified code for testing rather than executing the entire test suite, which is definitely going to save you a bunch of time. And this blog goes into detail explaining how developers often face time consuming processes when when tests run on unchanged code during pull request. However, with the new playwright version 1.46, developers can now focus on just the relevant tests, thus optimizing the continuous integration continuous deployment pipeline. And this feature works by detecting changes between the current branch and the target branch, including alterations and test files, independencies and source code files. Also, the post runs through a comprehensive guide on how to configure this feature and in a GitHub action setup. I love this feature. Butch is the expert when it comes to Playwright and a lot of these things. So a must follow and a must read that you can find down below. So do you use Robot Framework? If so, you're going to be excited for this next announcement. How the robot community has announced the release of Ride 2.1B1, a beta version of the popular Robot Framework integration development environment, and this announcement, made via the Robot Framework Forum, highlights several improvements and new features that aim to enhance the productivity of of robot framework testing users, for example, has performance boosts, user interface updates, enhanced code completion, Python 3.6 support, and a bunch of different bug fixes if you use the robot framework. Definitely something to check out. Let me know your thoughts in the comments and also on LinkedIn. Just noticed that Wasek, a QA engineer and open source advocate, has announced the launch of a new open source project called Ultra Roll Reporter. And with over 341 likes, I assume this is something a lot of people want to know more about. And the tool simplifies the reporting process for testng users by converting testng results from Excel files into detailed reports with a single click. And this eliminates need for writing report specific boilerplate code, making it easier for testers to generate insights quickly. And the project is available on GitHub, providing the testing community with a convenient solution for generating test reports efficiently. For users of testng, have you ever thought about how do you performance test large language models? Well, Joseph has. Joseph actually wrote a recent blog post on his Performance Metrics site that sheds light on the crucial role of performance engineering in improving the efficiency and scalability of large language models. And the article points out that as the demand for advanced artificial intelligence continues to rise, optimizing these models has become paramount for developers, testers and business users alike. And the article elaborates on the specific challenges posed by LLMs, including the complexity and resource intensive nature. It discusses various performance engineering strategies such as efficient algorithm design, hardware optimizations, and the implementation of distributed computer techniques. And by applying these strategies, companies can enhance the performance of their AI models while also reducing operational costs. Also, the post highlights the importance of continually monitoring and testing this iterative process ensures that the models are not only efficient, but also scalable to handling increasing amounts of data and more intricate task and periodic evaluations and real time adjustments are emphasized as the key practices to maintaining optimal performance performance when it comes to your LLMs. And speaking of performance, I came across a recent post on LinkedIn about an update to the JMeter project on GitHub by Dubaron Vincent, which introduced a new plugin called the Pacing JMETER plugin. And this plugin allows performance testers to pace the execution of their test plans more effectively. And the Pacing feature helps simulate real world user behavior by introducing delays between consecutive tests and iterations, ensuring that load tests better mimic real world usage patterns. And the Pacing JMeter plugin is designed to provide flexibility and precision in load testing scenarios. Users can configure delays based on fixed intervals, random distributions, or user defined pacing strategies. And this new feature promises to enhance the realism of performance tests by offering more accurate simulations of user behavior under different load conditions. And in DevOps news, we have harness has unveiled new AI agents designed to enhance your software delivery process and this post goes over how these new innovations aim to streamline various stages of software development, including continuous integration, continuous delivery, feature flagging and cloud cost management. And by leveraging AI, Harness hopes to significantly reduce manual workload for development teams. And last up is a Follow the money segment and it's all about how Defect Dojo, a company specializing in application security, has recently announced that has secured 7 million in Series A funding and Defect Dojo aims to streamline security testing processes, making it easier for organizations to identify and address vulnerabilities in their software applications. And if you don't know, Defect Dojo is an open source application security management tool that helps teams to streamline their vulnerability management and improve security testing processes, essentializes security findings from various tools tracking vulnerability, and automates key aspects of security workflows, making it easier for developers and security teams and testers to identify, track and resolve security issues in their application. All right, for links of everything of value we covered in this news episode, head on over to the links in the comments down below. So that's it for this episode of the Test Skill New Show. I'm Joe. 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.