TestProject is Dead, Taylor Swift Performance and More TGNS67

What automation testing tool just announced End of Life? Does testing actually improve customer experience? And what does Taylor Swift have to do with performance issues? Find out in this episode of the Automation and DevSecOps news show for the week of November 27th. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and let's do this. This episode is sponsored by the awesome folks at applitools. Visual AI Evaluation Testing is a must have for any automation project. Check it out for yourself with their free account offer by clicking in the link in the first 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 first up, we have Selenide that just released a new version, version 6.10. Let's check it out. So this version includes some improvements to the algorithm. It has a field download early select options using JavaScript. It also made the click chainable, the fixed sizes of new tabs, basic authentication with special characters was added, and a bunch of other new improvements. If you haven't used Selenide before, should definitely check out a few of my posts on testkill.com I actually did a really great interview with Hima Bindu all about it and it has a lot of advantages if you're starting off. If you want to really improve, make Selenium with Java easier. Selenide is a great option and to learn more you can check that out in the first comment down below. I actually missed releasing a new show last week, so a lot of these news articles are from last week and so this next article I actually received last week as an email telling me that Test Project will no longer be available after March 31, 2023. And in the email it linked to a blog post that talks a little bit more about why this is if you don't know. Actually Tricentis acquired Test project back in August 2019 and they made a lot of different investments into the platform and it has been free of charge by the Test Project founders nearly eight years ago. However, due to extensive work required to maintain and update the platform, they need their resources to focus on continually improving their other testing projects such as Tricentis Testimony, which is another software that was acquired by Tricentis maybe six months ago. So what you need to know is if you're using Test Project, you heavily invested in Test Project. It's ending on March 31, 2023, so you need to start making plans on what you're going to do to replace it here. One of the issues when you start investing in free software, they can go away, right? I guess any software can go away, but especially if you're investing in a free software, it's not paid for. Here's one of the concerns. When I interviewed the folks on my podcast years ago, they said it would always be free as far as they could tell into the future. And obviously you don't know. It probably was a high burden, but you just have to be careful on what tools you invest in. So if you are looking for an option on how to convert your test projects into another software, I found another News article on LinkedIn that that gives a solution that may be viable for you. And this is by Autumn at Testrigger and he says they're offering an unprecedented offer to convert all test project tests to Testrigger one time for free with the purchase of infrastructure or on premise deployment with a three year contract. So here's just one of many options that are probably going to come out there, but you need to stop planning because as I mentioned this is going away in March. So I often get asked are there any software I can use to test against to learn more about automation? Well, Selenium tester hit me up on Twitter and let me know if a new application he created that can help you with this exact issue. Let's check it out. So this practice site is an application that's available in five different versions which simulates an iterative process. It has an angular front end, geolocation based pricing, a lumen backend, well documented API, email functionality and mocking abilities. So if you're looking for a site to test against. So thank you Roy for this awesome resource. So one thing I always recommend folks do when they're writing automation tests is have code reviews. So this next article isn't specific about automation. It is however, how to move faster, wait less, and improve code reviews. And this is a case study of what they did at Meta. So maybe you can learn from this and apply it to your automation testing code reviews as well. So let's check it out. So this article is by Patrick and he outlines that code reviews are one of the most important parts of the software development process, which automation testing is clearly part of that process. And at Meta they recognize the need to make code reviews as fast as possible without sacrificing quality. And they're sharing several tools and steps that were taken at Meta to reduce the time waiting for code reviews. So this article goes into detail on what the approach was, what they did, how they made things better, different tools they use to help the process as well, with some recommendations also. So if you're doing anything about automation testing, you definitely want to check out this article on ways you can improve your code reviews as well. A recent study actually found that elevating testing improves customer experience DevOps maturity let's see what this is all about. So just be aware this study was funded by folks at Mable, which have a vested interest in testing. However, the results still are valid and I think it's worth looking into the testing and DevOps report share that while most respondents are still working to fully embrace DevOps practices, nearly one third of them also reported their deployment frequency and is 50 to 100% faster than the previous year, and another 7% reported that it's more than 100% faster. The report also revealed some other interesting highlights, like 66% of folks said that QA and test engineers are strategic or influential as their software engineering counterparts. 41% of teams that value QA as strategic to the organization are also twice as likely to rate customer satisfaction as as good or amazing. Teams with fully automated pipelines were 9x more likely to rate test coverage as good or excellent. And one of the co founders Dan mentioned that if quality engineering isn't strategic to your organization, you're in danger of losing to your competitors. So interesting insight. Love to know your thoughts on it and you can tell me about it in the comments down below if you agree or disagree with these survey results. So on LinkedIn I found an article on what I thought was a really cool real user, real world case study on how they performed Adobe analytics testing using Cypress. This is by Jay and he talks about and this is how Jay talks about how they found Google Analytics testing on the Internet but unfortunately did not find Adobe analytics testing. Therefore they created one which is really cool. And this article goes into detail on how to test Adobe Analytics. Points to ponder on Adobe analytics implementation. There's a demo website some steps that were taken to incorporate Adobe analytics testing using Cypress. What it looks like, some results and some links to a repo where you can learn more. So thank you Jay for this resource. And if you're using Cypress, you want to learn a little bit more about this. Definitely. Check this out in the first comment down below. Next up, performance testing news. So James Pulley always has interesting takes on performance and this is no exception. It's how Taylor Swift impacts performance engineering while lessons we can learn from a recent incident involving Taylor Swift. So as I mentioned I missed last week but this was in my notes for last week and it talks about how Ticketmaster was experiencing a lot of issues as part of Taylor Swift's latest content tour. And James goes over a few stats. 1.5 million Taylor Swift verified fans were invited to a select opening of tickets and 14 million hosts showed up. So James has been talking about this for a while is the impact of bots that a lot of people don't pay attention to when they're doing performance engineering or performance testing. And he has a take on how this happened and some other thoughts as well. And I also found a pretty funny meme from Marcus Merrill at Sauce Labs that cover this also, so I thought this meme was pretty hilarious. But Marcus also covers some things on what happened with Taylor Swift and Ticketmaster as well. Next up, Security News all right, this next article is a money segment and it comes your way via Mark Lambert. This came on my radar because Mark used to work at powersoft. He went to a security company and this talks how Armor code just raised 14 million in Series A funding. So if you never heard of Armor Code before, Armor Code really unifies security with traditional vulnerability management and scale application security programs so you can release faster and more securely. And according to this article as well, 60% of organizations prioritize speed over security when releasing software and that's a big problem. And that's one of the reasons why Armor Code received this round of funding. So if you've never heard of Armor Code before and you want to release faster yet more securely, definitely check this out in the first comment down below and full links of everything value we covered in this news episode. Hand it over to links in the first comment down below. And while you're there, make sure to check out our sponsor applitools free account offer to 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. My mission is to help you succeed in creating end to end full pipeline automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.