Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

November 2021

Katalon Recorder 5.6: Smarter Test Execution with Dynamic Test Suites and Global Variables

Delivering quality at speed has become part of the quality assurance lexicon over the past few years. However, as manual work remains “unskippable” in different steps of our test cycles, the goal of running more tests in a shorter time might seem to be out of reach. Today’s article will walk you through the latest features of Katalon Recorder 5.6 and explain how they help reduce manual efforts and shorten your next test cycles.

The Bug That Never Got Reported

Some of you might have faced this situation. A critical bug made it through to your end-users, and when it explodes on social media, your paying customers start abandoning your mobile app. You feel like the sky is falling! Too late, you discover that this happened because an internal user failed to report the bug. When application performance and stability can make or break your business, how can you prevent critical bugs from reaching your end-users? Well, this is where mobile app beta testing can provide tremendous value!

Testing APIs is Every Bit Important as Testing the UI

What I see too often though is folks running multiple UI tests in an attempt to validate specific output values or logic. A much easier way to accomplish this task is to run specific API tests on the business logic of the software. Why should we do this? It’s much faster and easier to write these tests. We can have our developers supporting this process and not just Selenium or automation experts. 'Work smarter, not harder' is a theory we should all be familiar with.

10 Things Testers Wish CIOs and CTOs Knew About Testing: Episode 5

In this new series from Sauce Labs, Marcus Merrell addresses ten things he wishes CIOs and CTOs understood about testing. In episode five, Marcus focuses on a piece of testing that is sometimes overlooked; testing APIs. Come along on this ten-episode journey to learn some best practices while Marcus dispels some myths about the testing space.

The Release of Selenium 4 (and 4.1) | Top Features to Look Into

The first-ever release of Selenium WebDriver 1.0 in 2007 has indented a lasting footprint in web automated testing. And through the years, the contributions of the Selenium project (WebDriver, Grid, and IDE) have truly transformed the way that we do quality assurance. Fast forward to the ‘drop-in’ release of Selenium 4 and Selenium 4.1, this article narrows down the top 5 changes you need to know for WebDriver, IDE, and Grid.

How to implement user story kick-offs and improve quality as a team

In part one of our series “How to improve quality as a team,” we talked about the effectiveness of adding shoulder checks to the agile development workflow and how that helps improve the overall quality of the product. This article introduces you to another fantastic exercise, you might be familiar, with called the user story kick-off. This practice helps larger teams align on more complex features, and in turn increase quality output as a team.

Push to production pipelines and JMeter

This post does not look at a particular aspect of JMeter nor does it give a detailed overview of how to use a particular tool that will compliment your performance testing with JMeter. What it is about is the principles of push to production pipelines and performance testing and while I have stated that this post is not specifically about JMeter in my experience JMeter is one of the best performance testing tools for this type of pipeline integration.

Performance Testing Web Sockets with JMeter

In this post we are going to look at WebSockets, specifically how JMeter can be used to test them. Web Sockets are not supported natively by JMeter but there are a couple of Plugins that you can use that work very nicely. One of them is called JMeter WebSocket Sampler by Maciej Zaleski and information on the library can be found here. The second and the one we will use for our post is also called JMeter WebSocket Sampler and is by Peter Doornbosch, more information on this Plugin can be found here.

A beginner's guide to test automation with Javascript (Nightwatch.js). Part 4.

Congratulations on getting to part 4 of the “A beginner’s guide to test automation with Javascript (Nighwatch.js)” blog series! This part will help you to improve your test script (and make it cooler). We’ll explain different style suggestions and the overall script structure that we follow in Loadero to bring your script to a new level.

How to Perform Load Testing with k6 using Buddy CI/CD

In this guide, we'll look at adding performance testing to your development workflow with Buddy and k6. k6 is an open-source load testing tool for testing the performance of APIs, microservices, and websites. Developers can use k6 to test a system's performance under a particular load to catch performance regressions or errors.

Selenium is a Terrific Automation Framework, but it's Not a Strategy

Here at Sauce Labs, we love Selenium. It was created by our co-founder Jason Huggins, so it will always have a soft spot in our hearts. But the truth is, if we are being technical, Selenium is more of a robotic browser control mechanism than a true test automation framework. While Selenium can definitely be part of your test automation strategy, the use of it in itself would not qualify as a proper testing strategy.

Test Automation Code Quality

Automation Code Quality is critical to successful test automation - and it’s often put at risk before the first piece of code is even written. In this session, Chris Wallander discusses what makes good test automation and how to write test cases with automation ROI in mind. He then shares several code design principles, complete with code examples, to help you get the most value out of your automated testing.

Why Security Quality Matters - And What You Should Do About It

As more users opt to do their banking online, the cost of having an unresponsive, unreliable and feature-deficient financial application or website will have growing negative implications. In this presentation, Justin Dolly draws on experience from 20+ years as a CISO and CSO to discuss the current state of security testing. He then shares how Sauce Labs is working to make security testing more comprehensive and more efficient, to help financial services organizations deliver reliable and secure web and mobile apps, faster.

10 Things Testers Wish CIOs and CTOs Knew About Testing: Episode 4

In this new series from Sauce Labs, Marcus Merrell addresses ten things he wishes CIOs and CTOs understood about testing. In episode four, Marcus discusses how Selenium is not a complete test automation strategy, just a key component. Come along on this ten-episode journey to learn some best practices while Marcus dispels some myths about the testing space.

Testquality | Test Management Github Integration Overview

TestQuality helps you build better software with fully integrated and easy to use Test Management for high-performance teams. The fastest way to build, run, and manage test cases, plans, runs, and cycles. Easily understand the quality and performance of your tests and with powerful test analytics.

Modern Software Needs Modern Testing: The Test Toolchain, AI, and Risk-Based Thinking

Web and mobile apps are now organizations’ primary connection with their customers. Staying relevant and winning market share requires that firms can make constant changes to these apps. However, can organizations deploy many more small changes - often many per day - with confidence and with managed risk? We'll take a closer look at how a modern testing toolchain combines both production safety nets - from canaries, to feature flags, to error reporting - with pre-production intent validation tools for both developers and quality assurance/quality engineering. We can see how it is possible to measure and predict and limit the risk of a change by using AI.

How to Test and Delivery Secure Mobile Apps in the New Era of Finance

Today, over 90% of global internet users access the internet via a mobile device. This trend continues in the financial services industry - in a recent survey by Business Insider, nearly 80% of respondents say mobile is the primary way they access their bank account. To attract and retain customers, it’s therefore necessary for financial services organizations to deliver reliable, secure, and easy to use mobile apps.

Top 15 List of Automation Testing Tools | Latest Update in 2022

Automation testing tools are applications designed to verify function and/or non-functional requirements via automated test scripts. With the Agile and DevOps manifesto as the standard of software testing, setting a clear-cut automation testing tools evaluation strategy is key. Ultimately, this strategy will need to answer the questions of: Plus, there isn’t really a one-size-fits-all automation tool. It really boils down to your team’s specific needs.

Adapting FMEA Steps for Modern Risk Management

If you’re in a regulated industry, you or your team has likely had to use Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) for compliance. But because of the way regulated industries have to balance between the world of very strict quality standards and also high-velocity Agile processes, traditional FMEA has to evolve in order to meet the challenges that are arising in this new reality.

Testing Serverless APIs on AWS

​​ Recently AWS made the new ARM processors for Lambda functions generally available. With that change Serverless functions now use Graviton2, said to offer better performance at lower cost. I built a sample API on AWS using API Gateway and Lambda, and I wrote two endpoints, one CPU-intensive (calculating Pi using Leibniz's formula), the other a typical data transfer endpoint (returning an arbitrary number of bytes). Two very different endpoints for my experiment.

Getting Started With Sauce Labs Low-Code Automated Web Testing

The software industry is transforming rapidly due to new changes brought on by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). AI & ML have democratized many aspects of the software testing process helping businesses, small and large, save time and money. As AI bridges the technical gap required in many jobs, more people will be able to add tremendous value to development teams — without the need of a computer science degree.

Quality Engineering Discussions: 5 Questions with George Ukkuru

George Ukkuru is a seasoned technocrat and AVP of quality engineering, DevOps, and SRE @Marlabs Inc. Over the course of two decades, he has helped Fortune 500 companies implement Agile testing practices. He has also authored a number of books on quality engineering and test automation. In this QnA, Ukkuru lays out the scope and depth of his experience without even trying.

How to implement shoulder-checks and improve quality as a team

The software Quality Assurance role (QA) has traditionally been seen as a person who finds bugs and tries to break things. While these tasks still remain a big part of the QA’s role, the industry has seen a shift towards a more holistic approach where the QA role advocates for the overall quality of delivery — both product and process. Incorporating the exercise of “shoulder checks” into the agile software development lifecycle increases quality output.

Automated vs. Manual Testing: When and Why?

Testing is the backbone of the Agile software development methodology. The efficiency of the testing process directly impacts the quality of the deliverables and the goodwill of the organization. Buggy software can lead to poor user experience, delayed project timelines, diminished brand value, and revenue losses. A strong testing process consists of several well-planned activities with definite timelines and a set of clear expected outcomes.

Top 10 Free Open-Source Testing Tools, Framework & Libraries

Free open-source frameworks, libraries, and tools are the go-to solutions for automation testing. The main difference between these is knowing your preference between creating your building a brand new test automation framework using libraries, or working on a made-ready tool where testing is all you will have to care about. This article gives you a quick glance at the Top 10 Free and Open Source Testing Tools, Tools, Framework & Libraries.

How should enterprises execute cross-browser testing?

As a small business or a startup, we often make decisions that can change the whole structure of our working processes. Honestly, this is not a bane that can bring the businesses down. Such businesses thrive on these decisions as they let them clearly decide what suits them best and why. What’s better than finding it on their own by trying a mix of things? As for this post, it is a bit different from startups and small businesses.

Low-Code Automated Web Testing Offered by Sauce Labs

Intelligent low-code systems are beginning to take hold across the software development lifecycle and Sauce Labs is excited to be helping companies along this journey. Low-code automated testing simplifies and accelerates web application testing by enabling non-technical team members to create, run, and manage tests on Sauce Labs Virtual Device Clouds. Teams can now leverage Sauce Connect to execute their low-code tests behind a firewall, removing any friction presented with knowing how to code.

10 Things Testers Wish CIOs & CTOs Knew About Testing: Test Automation Should Not Be Used to Replace Humans

In my 18 years of working in quality engineering and the testing community, I’ve developed some best practices to help organizations create and manage their overall test strategies. This is the second in a 10-week series on what testers wish their CIOs and CTOs knew about testing. Each week, I’ll share my experience to help educate tech leaders on key priorities their testing teams need them to understand.

10 Things Testers Wish CIOs and CTOs Knew About Testing: Episode 3

In this new series from Sauce Labs, Marcus Merrell addresses ten things he wishes CIOs and CTOs understood about testing. In episode three, Marcus discusses the different situations that should rely on testing automation versus those that call for the human component. Come along on this ten-episode journey to learn some best practices while Marcus dispels some myths about the testing space.

Browser testing and API load testing in the same script with k6 (k6 Office Hours #35)

CEO Robin Gustafsson, Tom Miseur (Technical Specialist) and Nicole van der Hoeven (Developer Advocate) talk about xk6-browser, which allows browser testing in the same script as API load testing. We're really excited to demonstrate it and talk about why we think this is a great next step for k6.

Combine k6 OSS and Prometheus for better observability

k6 Cloud, our managed testing solution, supports Prometheus to store and correlate performance testing metrics within your observability stack since a while now. Announced at Grafana ObservabilityCON, we launched Prometheus support to k6 Open Source - our free, open, and extensible load testing tool. k6 OSS supports sending k6 metrics to multiple outputs such as InfluxDB, New Relic, StatsD, and more.

Software Functional Testing Checklist

Even when seamlessly combining manual and automated approaches, testing every functional combination within web or mobile applications is challenging. Unfortunately, this means critical issues inevitably go undetected and make their way into the hands of your customers. We strive for perfect code, perfect releases, and perfect apps, but alas, perfection is a myth. With that in mind, if you cannot catch every issue before a release, at least you can take the proper steps to limit them.

Growing a Culture of Quality - CTM Online

Long ago was a time where testing was purely seen as an activity by a siloed team who executed 1000’s of tests towards the end of a project. In the modern world, this is still a very real situation in some areas, but on the whole, testing as a collaborative, continuous activity is much more the norm. But getting to that stage is not easy, for some reason, there has historically been a stigma attached to testing as a lesser activity that slows the release of a project down and changing this mindset is a huge obstacle to get over.

Replacing the FMEA Risk Assessment: How to Manage Risk in an Agile World

Product failures and defects can occur on many different shapes and levels, impacting any part of the user experience, functionality, and even safety. In the past, organizations were taking the approach of of Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) for risk assessment. This allowed teams to identify and prevent failure before a product or update is released.

A Guide to Load Testing Node.js APIs with Artillery

Artillery is an open-source command-line tool purpose-built for load testing and smoke testing web applications. It is written in JavaScript and it supports testing HTTP, Socket.io, and WebSockets APIs. This article will get you started with load testing your Node.js APIs using Artillery. You’ll be able to detect and fix critical performance issues before you deploy code to production.

DevOps: How to embrace collaboration with fearless visibility

Embracing DevOps is not easy. There are a lot of misconceptions about what DevOps is. DevOps is not a team, or a methodology, or a job role. DevOps is a culture founded on a set of work patterns and practices that have an impact on the whole value chain, from business to operations. DevOps helps you move from only having visibility about your own work, to having a birds-eye view and overall understanding of the whole value stream (from business to customer feedback).

A Test Lab and How to Maintain It - Vladimir Yatskovskiy - TestComplete Community Day 2021

This session is about a TestComplete test lab. It gives an overview of how we built our environment and how we manage it in the TestComplete QA Team. It would be of special interest for anyone in the process of creating/updating your test lab or you are simply curious about our way of doing things.

Scalable Web Tests in TestComplete - Igor Staroverov - TestComplete Community Day 2021

This video explains the new mode of working with Web Objects in TestComplete. This mode is based on using the Selenium framework. Today, this framework is widely used in web testing and that’s why the transition to TestComplete will be smooth and easy. The new mode is the combination of the two powerful products - TestComplete and Selenium.

BDD with CucumberStudio and TestComplete - Sergey Sammal - TestComplete Community Day 2021

This video describes how SmartBear CucumberStudio and TestComplete can be combined together for implementing the BDD approach in your test automation. Including Jenkins into this set will complete your solution with full orchestration. We will show a step-by-step guide using our example project on how to achieve this goal and what benefits you will have using SmartBear tools.

Introducing browser automation and end-to-end web testing with k6

We’re excited to launch xk6-browser at Grafana ObservabilityCON today, an extension to k6 adding support for browser automation via the Chrome Devtools Protocol (CDP). k6 was built because we weren’t satisfied with the developer experience offered by existing load testing solutions. We believe in shifting performance testing, and with it observability, to the left.

10 Things Testers Wish CIOs & CTOs Knew About Testing: The Goal of Testing is Risk Mitigation, Not Perfect Software

In a perfect world, our dev teams would write flawless code and never make a single mistake (though I suppose I might be out of a job then.) The truth of the matter is software never is perfect. Mistakes, like Thanos, are inevitable. Moreover, testers shouldn’t be attempting to make the software perfect, just mitigate risk by protecting revenue and the customer experience. When we consider the overall customer experience this becomes easier to understand.

Squid game: how we load-tested Ably's Control API

We recently announced Ably's Control API, a REST API that enables you to manage Ably's configuration programmatically. You can now use the Control API to configure anything previously only configurable via the Ably dashboard. The Ably platform is designed around four pillars of dependability: Performance, Integrity, Reliability, and Availability.

Regression Testing of Performance - Alexandr Gubarev - TestComplete Community Day 2021

Time is money. And sometimes bugs related to application hangs and performance degradations dissatisfy customers and businesses lose money. When QA has automated the main test cases, it's time to think about performance as well. This video will be useful for those who want to add performance checks to their functional tests, regardless of the type of application: Desktop, Web, Mobile, or even a web service.

k6 load testing on Kubernetes using the k6 Operator, with Hans Knecht (k6 Office Hours #34)

Nicole van der Hoeven (Developer Advocate) is joined by Hans Knecht, Principal Cloud Engineer at Mission Lane, to talk about Hans's specific use case for k6, and how he does distributed load testing with it for free on a Kubernetes cluster using the k6 Operator.

Why Testlio joined the Continuous Delivery Foundation

Testlio’s vision is imagining software experiences that energize the world. It’s a big vision and a big reason why companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, SAP, and ViacomCBS work with Testlio. This vision signals a responsibility that goes beyond delivering best-in-class testing services, bringing together a global network of expert testers, and building a platform that enables a new way of testing.

Top 7 Test Reporting Tools | Latest Update

Many businesses are burdened by an excessive amount of testing data. In that circumstance, it becomes impossible to distinguish between what is valuable, and what is noise. Therefore, having an effective reporting system in place in your company will ensure that all data is properly gathered and transformed into actionable insights. This article will walk you through the benefits of test reporting, and the top 7 test reporting tools that are currently available on the market.

Do Stable Tests Ensure Quality? Roundtable Discussion

Organizations, these days, rush to automate tests, spend time stabilizing them and ensure that there are no failing tests, at all times. So, when there are no tests failing, does that mean your product is of the best quality? Hear it as we discuss with some of the best industry experts, Lisette Zounon, Bas Dikjstra, Srinivas Kantipudi & Brijesh Deb powered by The Test Chat Community!

10 Things Testers Wish CIOs & CTOs Knew About Testing: A Tester's Job is to Model and Advocate for Great User Experiences

In my 18 years of working in quality engineering and the testing community, I’ve developed some best practices to help organizations create and manage their overall test strategies. This is the first in a 10-week series on what testers wish their CIOs and CTOs knew about testing. Each week, I’ll share my experience to help educate tech leaders on key priorities their testing teams need them to understand. This week, we’ll talk about the user experience.

Smart Test Reporting in Software Testing | Katalon TestOps

In a perfect world, systems or automated tests would never fail – everything in software test reports would, literally, “go green.” And to add to the stress, failures don’t just always go our ways to fail for the same reason. There’s something different every time: bugs in the AUT, errors in the test case itself, or problems within the structure to cause timeouts during execution.

What's New In Loadero (October 2021)

October is over and it’s time to share the newest updates to Loadero that were made during the month. We’ve been working on adding a WebRTC metrics table for a long time, and are very happy to announce that it is available in the results reports. This update makes it very easy to find out about some of the possible issues in video calls. While this might be the most important of the news, we got more stuff to let you improve your tests. Here is what we added to Loadero in October.