Top Automation Framework New Test Data Tool and More! TGNS74

What's now the most popular automation testing framework according to GitHub stars? Do you think good performance is expensive? How about bad performance? And have you seen the new free tool that helps you with test data? Find out in this episode of the Automation and DevSecOps news show for the week of March 5th. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and let's do this. This episode of the Test Guild News show is sponsored by the awesome folks at applitools. Applitools is a next generation test or automation platform which is powered by visual AI, which helps you increase quality, accelerate delivery and reduce costs. What I think is the world's most intelligent test automation platform. But seeing is believing. So create a free account now and see it for yourself by using the link down below. Check it out. First up Automation News so speaking of applitools, I mentioned this a few weeks ago, but this is your last chance, your very last chance to sign up now for the Test Automation University Conference that's running this week, March 8th to the 9th. So this is a two day free event. The first day is hands on workshops and the second day is followed by automation sessions, followed by live Q and A with each of the speakers. If you haven't checked out the lineup, you definitely should. If you haven't registered already, I highly recommend you do. Hope to see you there. Now, before anyone says anything to me, just so you know, I'm just reporting the news as I see it. I don't necessarily agree or disagree with any of these news items. I I'm just presenting them to you and have you decide. So this next post kind of stirred up some controversy and I just wanted to share it with you as well. So this is from the folks at Checkly where they use Playwright based tests for their synthetic monitoring and executing millions of monthly checks. And in the post they post a graphic that actually shows how Playwright is Now the number one automation testing framework on GitHub, according to people up voting with Stars. Now, whether or not this is a valid way of determining whether or not a tool is the best, it's up to you to decide. I believe the tool that is the best is the tool that works for you. So regardless if it's open source or vendor based, I don't care if the tool works for me and my team to create better software and create higher quality for our customers. And that's the tool I think is the best. But different people have different ways of judging which tool is best. One of them could be GitHub stars. But as you could see by the comments, it's a very controversial way of ranking different tools and everyone has different views on what they think is right or wrong based on this post. So a lot of people say it's a flawed way to determine whether or not a tool is the best just based on GitHub likes so and others talk about how some tools are completely open source and they follow standards while others don't. So that's how they measure tools. A lot of great discussions going on in the comments, so so check it out. Read the comments in this post and let me know what you think in our comments down below this news item. So if you're using any of these automation tools listed, you're probably struggling with locators, we'll have another resource for you that's going to help you with your locator strategy. So if you want to know how do you write a good css selector? Is XPath always the wrong choice? And what about custom attributes or text? Then this webinar is for you. So they're going to go over how to understand how common automation frameworks handle locating elements in a web UI test. You're going to hear best practices for working with selectors and locators, as well as warnings of red flags to look out for. And you're going to explore some specific locators and how they can help create more robust tests. And this is going to be led by three industry experts. We have Christian Philip and Indy Knight. So if you're struggling with locators, definitely check this out because I think it's going to help you with your locator strategy for sure. So if you're one of the folks that is a GitHub star lover of Playwright, then I have a awesome resource for you on how to handle Multi Factor authentication using playwright. So this LinkedIn post goes over how they were struggling with how to use Playwright to test their model driven app and how to handle MFA prompts. And although you could turn off Multi Factor Authentication prompts, it's not always easy to explain it to your SecOps team. So here's one way of doing it step by step using Playwright how they worked around this particular issue. It includes what the issue was, the key pieces as well of the approach of handling it with some screenshots, some code, and some key takeaways. So if you're doing anything with Playwright and Multi Factor Authentication, I think this is a must read and you can check it out in the first comments down below. So as I mentioned when it comes to tools, I don't care if it's open source or vendor based or anything. All I care about is if it helps me create better software faster. So here's a new tool by a vendor, SmartBear that can help you with API testing and this was posted by Noel How Smart Bear has just released Swagger Hub Explorer and it goes over how developers can now instantly analyze restful APIs and Apache Kafka services with the new Swagger Hub Explorer. And it also talks about how Swagger Hub Explorer is a developer centric tool that brings new innovation to smarter API lifecycle portfolio of solutions and developers can now gain increased visibility into API endpoints while better understanding the functionality. And it also talks about how thousands of organizations are now using Apache Kafka as well as and how this tool can help you test these type of API endpoints. So if you're doing any type of API testing, you're dealing with Kafka, this is definitely something you should check out and let me know what your thoughts are in the comments down below. All right, we talked about open source tools, we talked about vendor tools. How about free tools? Well, this next solution is by Sanjay Kumar who keeps releasing more and more tools to help you with your testing efforts and this one I think you're really going to enjoy. And the new tool is called Auto Test Data and now generates test data in just three clicks. No installation, just open the URL and generate data. So no more wasting time and writing code to generate fake data. And it's absolutely free and offered by the folks at SelectorsHub. So if you go to autotestdata.com you could see how it works. You choose the type of data property name and the options. It gives you an option to choose the data to use to export to and you can tell how many rows and export it and then use it within your test. So another great solution from Sanjay. Thank you Sanjay for this and definitely it's a must check out tool I think as test data is really critical for any type of testing automation effort. So I'm not sure if you've seen Sauce Labs lately, but they actually rebranded and it's not necessarily an automation specific post, but it's something that really caught my attention. And if you haven't checked out Sauce Labs I think it's going to catch your attention as well. And it's how Sauce Labs after all these years have decided to refresh their branding and they're going a completely opposite direction of what you may be used to. So this article goes over why they rebranded, what it now looks like and some of the key reasons for that. And the first thing right off the bat you can notice is they've moved away from the red branding and they're using this green color now. Also, the logo itself no longer has the lightning bolt. It's just a more, I don't know, generic, but just a more standard type of logo. And if you go to the website, you can see the website has changed significantly as well. So just a little fun. If you haven't been to Sauce Labs recently, check it out. Check out the new rebranding and let me know what you think of it in the comments down below. So we talked about Checkly earlier, but I forgot to mention they also released a new feature that you might enjoy. So Checkly adds monitoring as code to their testing platform. And so last week Checkly added a monitoring as code workflow capability to their software as a service platform that is used to create synthetic tests or applications. So the Checkly platform, if you don't know, spins up browsers to test and can now monitor how applications are performing at both the user interface and the application performance interface level at the API level. So another great new feature by the folks at Checkly. It's a platform that's been growing over the past few years. You haven't checked it out. Definitely check it out and you can find the link for it in the comments down below. Next up, Performance and site Reliability news. So if you think good performance is expensive, what about the cost of having bad performance for your applications? Well, this next article goes over a framework that might help you actually figure that out. And this is by Joseph and he talks about in his 20 years he has worked with many customers to reduce performance risk in critical IT systems and most of these performance engineering and load testing projects were introduced after severe outages in the production environment which affected these businesses. And unfortunately system performance is an invisible element during software development. You only realize performance bottlenecks when it's almost too late and often only when customers are affected in escalations happen to such problems. So he's introducing this really cool performance engineering budget quadrants as an idea to help you with some guidelines and a reality check to your performance efforts. And as you can see he breaks down the performance budget into four key areas and he uses a risk cost type of rating system and he goes over what each area is and things you can do for each of those performance areas as well. So thank you Joseph for another awesome performance resource. So for links of everything of value we covered in this news episode. Head on 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 and 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's helped you succeed at creating end and full stack pipeline automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.