Visual and API Testing with Playwright, JMeter Book and more TGNS149

Do you know how to do visual testing in Playwright? What is an awesome way to simplify and automate front end testing? And how do you master Apache JMeter from load testing to DevOps? Find out on this episode of the Test Skill new show for the week of March 2nd. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and let's do this. Hey, before we get into the news, I want to thank this week's sponsor Zap Test AI, an AI driven platform that can help you supercharge your automation efforts. It's really cool because their Intelligent Copilot generates optimized code snippets while their Plan studio can help you effortlessly streamline your test case management. And what's even better is you can experience the power of AI in action with their risk free 6 month proof of concept featuring a dedicated Zap expert at no upfront costs unlock unparalleled efficiency and ROI in your testing process. Don't wait. Schedule your demo now and see how it can help you improve your test automation efforts using the link down below. All right, I found this first article on LinkedIn and was actually posted by Michael, who posted a link to this article. A blog post by Maxwell, who's a test engineer at Scott Logic who dives into the effectiveness of using Playwright snapshot testing for verifying visual UI elements. So some cool things he goes over. He highlights that utilizing Playwright snapshots in conjunction with mock data can significantly enhance the speed of your UI regression testing, and this approach allows for rapid automation inspection of UI components across major browsers including chromium, Firefox and WebKit. Also, by tying multiple assertions to a single snapshot, testers can increase their coverage of the UI testing process. And this method is really beneficial for applications with rapidly scaling graphical user interfaces. And he also goes over a real life case study involving creation of a dashboard that is used to forecast air quality and real time measurements. And he also goes on how Playwright snapshot testing proved valuable in verifying the data in these grids within these charts to make sure they were visualized correctly even after various UI interactions. So it's just a really great study on how you can integrate Playwright snapshot testing into your workflows to ensure your application GUI elements render as intended across different browsers to help you facilitate the maintenance of a consistent user experience to delight your users. And you can find a link for this down below. So for the webinar of the week, I highly recommend you check out our upcoming webinar on streamlining your testing with Datadog Synthetic monitoring. We're going to go over end to end testing and why it's crucial to ensuring seamless user experience. But maintaining these tests and an agile workflow is really time consuming and resource intensive. And also, as you know, traditional testing methods can often limit who can create tests, require costly infrastructure and operate in silos separate from your monitoring stack. So we're going to go over a live demo that shows you how datadog synthetic monitoring simplifies automates and scales testing across your engineering, QA and DevOps teams. You're also going to discover how to create no code self healing browser mobile tests that simulate real user journeys, how to verify endpoints, API tests that run tests across global locations, devices and protocols, and how to shift left by integrating synthetic tests into your CICD pipelines for faster issue detection and safer releases. You definitely don't want to miss this webinar that's happening next week and you can sign up for it using the registration link down below. Hope to see you there. Also a new tool Feature Alert the Test Chimp has just launched a new agent called Chimp Agent to help you with exploratory testing and this AI driven exploratory testing agent was designed to simplify and enhance test creation. This tool allows testers to define test scenarios in plain English or upload gherkin files which the agent then converts into executable test scripts. And by simulating human interactions in a browser test chip aims to generate more realistic and reliable tests and the agent also records testing sessions, capturing user interactions and UI transitions to automatically generate detailed UI tests with assertions. And this feature helps reduce the manual effort required while improving accuracy in your regression testing. So I know, I know you've been hearing a lot about AI. Especially now you're hearing more and more about AI driven agents. And here's just another example you can learn more about to see if it can actually help you with your day to day automation testing efforts. And Speaking More about AI Agents I just came across this other blog post on LinkedIn by Amand, who goes over how Anthropic has introduced the Model Context Protocol, an open source standard designed to streamline how AI agents access and interact with with data across multiple systems. And even though we always talk a lot about the advancement of AI, most models face critical limitations in accessing relevant data. Each new data source within a context, repository, business tool or development environment requires a separate integration which creates scalability challenges for AI powered workflows. The solution according to them is MCP as a unified standard. So this new standard is designed to hopefully allow AI agents and assistants to securely interact with with various data sources through a single open protocol. And this means eliminating fragmented integrations, enabling faster implementations with an open source SDK and also enhance AI context retention. So why am I bringing this up if you're a software tester while software testers leveraging AI Driven Automation, MCP could simplify how AI based testing tools are used to retrieve and apply test data, making AI powered testing more scalable and context aware. Just another standard that you probably should be aware of and you can find out more about it down below. Also in our Test Guild community that you could join for free using the link down below. Sebastian goes over a new API testing plugin he created for Playwright called Pwapi Plugin, which has just been officially released which offers you a way to streamline ways to inspect API calls directly within Playwright's ui. And this open source tool allows testers to view, get, post, put and fetch request in real time, making API test results instantly visible during your Playwright based testing. Some key features Sebastian goes over is the UI integration which displays API calls directly within Playwright. It has a lightweight code base, so the plugin is built with only around 100 lines of. NET code, which should ensure minimal performance impact. And it's open source and released on both GitHub and NPM. So if you're a Playwright tester and you need to do anything with API testing, here's another plugin you definitely should check out to see if it can help you as well. All right, so as you could tell, I'm a bibliomaniac, so I love new books. I was excited to find this new book recommendation I found on my LinkedIn feed by Antonio all about JMeter so the newly updated edition of Master JMETER from load testing the DevOps has just been released which introduces key updates aiming to improve performance testing strategies, and the latest edition includes a new chapter on structured performance teams and defining essential skills sets for effective load testing operations. The book also expands on its guidance for analyzing and visualizing load testing results, and the updates in this area include discussions on anti methodologies, common pitfalls and performance testing that can lead to misleading or inaccurate results, and cognitive biases which can impact how testers interpret performance data. And this refinements aim to help testers generate more reliable actual insights from their load test. And the forward is also by Alexander Padelko, who's a known performance engineering expert that I always go to as well. So so that alone should let you know that this book is legit, and it's probably something you should definitely check out for yourself as well. And speaking of DevOps and performance, if you haven't checked this out already or haven't heard, there's There's a new DevPerf Ops foundation that the DevPerf Ops foundation has announced the appointment of Lee Barnes to its Board of Directors. And I think this is a great addition because if you don't know, Lee is the Chief Quality Officer at Forte Group and brings decades of experience in performance testing and and software quality to the organization, which focuses on integrating performance engineering into DevOps practices. Lee also emphasizes the critical role of performance engineering throughout the software development lifecycle, stating that it's essential to delivering both optimal user experience and business value. So his addition to the board is expected to strengthen the Foundation's mission to close the gap between DevOps and performance engineering. And that's one reason why I'm always excited about performance testing. So this is another resource you definitely should check out. Read the manifesto and let me know your thoughts in the comments down below. And Once again on LinkedIn, I found this resource for one of my go to people for open source contributions. And this is Srini who talks about how Infosys has just launched an open source responsible AI toolkit which is aimed at promoting ethical practices and artificial intelligence development. And this toolkit, which is part of the Infosys Topaz Response AI suite, is designed to help enterprises address challenges such as privacy breaches, security threats, bias outputs and deepfakes. That's some really cool features like advanced defense measures. It also has enhanced transparency and Customizable and compatible Being open source, a toolkit is fully customizable and compatible with a diverse range of AI models and systems. And because it's open source, obviously this is a good way to start trying to integrate these tools into your testing workflows to ensure your AI systems operate ethically and transparently, which is also another area testers should always be concerned about when dealing with AI. All right, so that's it for this episode of the Test Skill. All right. For links of all right, full links of everything are valid. We covered in this news episode. Hand it 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 help you succeed in creating end to end full stack pipeline automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.