Toad Testing, Karate Course for Newbie, Mock APIs and More TGNS104

Have you seen the new Toad concept in testing it? Want to know a way to learn karate and API testing at the same time? And what major website Black Friday disaster crash led to a huge sales plunge? Find out in this episode of the Test Skill News show for the week of December 3rd. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and let's do this. But before we get into it, are you looking to take your automation projects to the next level? Look no further than applitools and the Visual Validation in AI testing platform. Trust me, it is a major game changer. Plus you could try it for yourself by creating a free account now by using the special link in the comment down below and see the difference for yourself. So lately you probably heard a lot about the relationship between observability monitoring and testing, but I found an excellent resource that goes over this in more detail to help you in your teams. And this is Chris Kent's latest blog post that delves into how these elements are increasingly entwined, especially in the context of DevOps. And Chris argues that while observability and monitoring are not traditionally part of testing, they can significantly enhance testing capabilities when executed effectively. So monitoring involves capturing application data to build dashboards, reports and alerts, providing insights into system behavior and performance. Observability, on the other hand, is about actively searching for information, especially for unknown unknowns, and testing the internal state of an application based on external outputs. And this post goes over all this and reveals a concept called Toad, which is testing observability in DevOps, and it highlights a way to understand the common thread between these three aspects. This approach suggests that focusing on testing observability and DevOps together can lead to a deeper understanding of an application. For example, robust monitoring can reveal information about a system's functionality and reliability, which are traditionally assessed during testing, and observability extends this by providing insights into into the application under test. Chris's post is part of a larger conversation about context driven testing, contributing to a crowdsourced book by the association for Software Testing titled Navigating the World of a Context Driven Tester that offers a more integrated and comprehensive approach to understanding and improving applications that you definitely should check out. And you can find it in that first comment down below. And a new blog post that caught my attention is by Gleb that goes over a new approach to managing end to end tests and using GitHub Actions. And in this, Gleb goes over a method involving keeping tests in a separate repository from the web application, a strategy that offers both advantages and challenges so this key feature of the setup is the use of the slash command in GitHub Actions. When a developer opens a pull request in a web application repository, they could type a comment with the text slash cypress to trigger the test run into the separate test repository. So and the results of this test run are then posted back to the comment and the pull request, creating what is a seamless integration between the two repositories. Very cool. And you can definitely learn more by checking out this must read blog post in the comments down below and let me know what you think. Also my news hunting journey I found another blog post that goes over a tool that I don't think a lot of people take advantage of and this is by Amit who shares how his recent journey exploring various API mocking tools for company wide implementations has come across a cool tool called MSW or Mock Service Worker. And the mock service worker JavaScript capabilities really caught his attention. So what sets Mock Service Worker apart? According to mit, it's innovative use of service workers. So this technique allows to intercept network requests using the fetch API, creating a mock environment so authentic the JavaScript code won't even realize it's dealing with a mock response. And he also mentioned his LinkedIn post that he took this tool for a spin with a React JS test and the results were stellar and the integration was smoother and the tool performed flawlessly compared to some of the other tools used. So if you've never heard of Mock Service Worker, I highly recommend you check it out like I did as well. And once again, it's an API mocking library for JavaScript developers and testers that offers a client agnostic approach to mocking that can be used across various frameworks and environments. So if you're looking for a tool that has no configuration with a no adapter approach that allows for unprecedented reuse of mocks across different environments and tools. Whether it's integration tests, automated browser tests, demo showcases, or even React native apps, Mock Service Worker provides a constant, reliable mocking solution. Now highly recommend you check it out as well. Thank you Amit for this tool recommendation. Also, I just want to officially announce that we just released a new course at the Test Guild. If you don't know Test Guild has a bunch of free courses, all you need to do is go to test guild.com, click on courses and you see all the free courses. But our latest is a hands on guide to API testing with karate and our instructor is James Willett who's a well known test automation engineer and he's done a bunch of other courses as well. A well known instructor and his hands on course introduces API testing using the Karate framework, which if you haven't tried yet, is a real powerful tool designed to implement all types of test automation including API testing in a simple and expressive non technical syntax. And this course goes over the essential techniques and functionalities of karate from writing your first test script, executing parallel tests. So it goes over installation and setup of Karate, writing API tests in Karate, creating an API testing automation framework with Karate, implementation of data driven tests in Karate and execution of karate tests and analysis of test results and reports. Whether you're a beginner in test automation and looking for a way to upgrade your API testing skills, I highly recommend you check out this course and you can register for free now in the comment down below. So I don't know how popular this next article is going to be, but it caught my attention because it really highlights some cool uses of AI with SaaS based testing. And this is how a company PN announces Rapid Flow Kit, which is powered by advanced AI algorithms and it's used for system integrators and organizations plan to migrate to SAP S or 4 HNA. It offers a comprehensive suite of tools to accurately project estimates, enhance automatic code corrections, simplification tools and smart testing solutions. So if you're probably one of the people that are trying to do this and you're looking for some tools, especially AI based tools to help you with no code test automation to help reduce testing time and resources according to this article, by 85%, something you should check out and see it for yourself and see if it works. Also, I'm not sure how many of you all are using RPA testing, but if you are, here's a solution I think you're going to enjoy as well. And this was posted by Joe Fernandez How Microsoft's Power Automate Desktop introduced a cool RPA feature, the Desktop Flow Activity Copilot. This was actually revealed at a recent IGNITE conference and this tool adds awesome Monitoring Desktop Flows that offers a conversational interface that allows users to ask natural language questions about your automation activities. So some key functionalities include tracking flow runs, analyzing errors, checking machine statuses, and examining user engagement with flows so it could do things like Users can easily find out the most frequently run flows from last week, compared successful and failed flows from the past quarter, identify machines under maintenance, and list the top active users of of flows in the previous month. And so this feature is still in preview and it is powered by Azure's OpenAI service. So if you're interested in RPA, if you're just getting started with the RPA, or if you've never tried Microsoft's Power Automate desktop, you definitely should check it out because it's adding a lot of cool new features that's going to help you with RPA testing. So I'm always finding new tools and new resources from Umesh and this is no exception. Umesh posted something about the self operating computer framework that was recently introduced that I think it offers a lot of cool features that you should know about. So let's check it out. So this framework was designed to enable models like GPT4 Vision to interact with the computer through mouse clicks and keyboard interactions. This tool is different from traditional test automation and RPA tools because it allows a model to view the screen and perform mouse and keyboard actions to achieve specific goals similar to human operators. And the makers of this framework developing this framework as part of a larger project which includes Agent 1 Vision, a model aimed at more accurate click locator predictions. And this is a step towards creating a full service operating computer which I think is really cool. So I just think this is where the industry is going with vision based automation and this is something you should learn more about and you can find out about it in the comment down below. And James Pulleys always reminds us why you need to pay attention to performance. If you're not following James Pulley, you definitely should. Every Black Friday he has a live show on his podcast that goes over Black Friday crashes and he posted this about a major Australian retailer that faced a significant downturn due to its website crashing during Black Friday, one of the busiest days of the year for retail. So the company reported a 11.9% drop in sales from July to November, coinciding with a major website crash during Black Friday. All right, for links of everything of value we covered in this news episode, headed over to the links in the comments 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 animation testing to the next level leveraging visual AI. So that's it for this episode of the Test Skill new show. I'm Joe. My mission is help you succeed in creating end to end full stack pipeline automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.