2021 was a revolutionary year and the global workforce continued working in a hybrid fashion. For the QA industry, concepts like Robotic Process Automation and AI/ML became more and more advanced. New versions of both Open-Source and Commercial tools continued to flourish, which made DevOps more accessible and test automation more user-friendly. In addition, testers across the globe actively participated in many online events and conferences in order to improve their knowledge.

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Testsigma Community Edition, the first ever open source test automation platform that works out of the box for web and mobile apps, and APIs. The Community Edition brings a core part of Testsigma’s cloud-based platform directly to the QA community. This includes an integrated automation engine, test development and test runner modules, and some cool new customization features. Check out the project repo on Github and give it a go.

The first month of the year draws to an end. High time for an update from your trusted load testing provider!

Quality Assurance (QA) is a typical process for ensuring that the end product of any Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) corresponds to the overall and scope-agreed-upon objectives. Historically, quality assurance (QA) testing has been introduced rather late in the software development cycle. In a Waterfall process, for example, the software is created and then sent along to the QA team, which provides input and then sends the program back to the development team to be fixed.

Will your software perform well during peak hours? Can it handle the load during sales periods? Is your infrastructure valid if you double your sales by the end of the year? These are just some of the questions that scalability testing can help you answer. Scalability testing evaluates the activity level of your application by upscaling and downscaling the number of users.

A leading company in the healthcare industry has been providing value and care to its clients worldwide for over 20 years. With more than 5,000 employees, this healthcare provider focuses on developing, manufacturing, and distributing continuous glucose monitoring systems for diabetes management.

This blog post is a summary of my talk at the iOS Singapore Conference 2022 about scaling up iOS automated tests using fastlane and other tools.

In a recently posted article on DZone, “Microservices: Good for Developers’ Mental Health,” Sauce Labs engineer, Simone Pezzano, addresses the link between developer confidence and mental health in today’s new workplace. Pezzano tells the story of his team’s bumpy start on their journey from monolith to microservices. Initially, Pezzano viewed microservices as a scary concept with rapid release cycles and shorter testing times.

Pearson, founded in the 19th century, is one of the world leaders in providing education services all around the globe. Francisco Muniz is the Performance Architect for Pearson, responsible for Performance Alignment across Pearson’s Virtual Learning. This position entails working with many different parts of the organization, such as Architecture, Development, and QA. As such, Francisco was leading and overseeing the important Octoperf and Loadrunner software switching project.

Unit testing ensures that every feature or component of a program functions as intended. Unit testing is carried out by developers during the development sprint stages. This assists them in identifying and correcting tiny faults that might lead to larger issues in later stages. Previously, conducting unit tests on a built module was a time-consuming and laborious effort since developers had to manually test code for each component. As a result, final release dates were pushed back.

A defect, in simple language, is a flaw in a system i.e., a system is not working as it should. Defects are also called bugs or faults. In case of software, when the software code has been built, it is executed and then any defects may cause the system to fail to do what it should do (or do something it shouldn't), causing a failure. However, not all defects result in failures.

Today, software applications need to deliver a consistent and reliable experience across multiple browsers, operating systems, and devices. To accomplish this, companies are spending valuable resources and time manually deploying dedicated test infrastructures. This translates into a limited availability of test scenarios and prevents companies from generating enough test coverage to ensure the best user experience across the most commonly used platforms.

SmartBear recently released its State of Software Quality | Code Review 2021 report. The report highlights the industry trends and findings based off a survey of close to 800 respondents from the coding industry. While many interesting discoveries were shared, we’ve narrowed down and examined the top ten insights from the 2021 report.

“Let’s get to the point” is something we’d all love to say in certain situations. The talkative restaurant server. The aunt who tells the same story over and over. The cooking blog that tells the author’s entire life story before the recipe. These people love to talk but they can’t read the room. They make the listener/reader work extra hard to understand the point, like finding a needle in a haystack.

Test Automation is a necessary precondition for high-quality modern development. Testing and test automation must be integrated into the software delivery processes to give the team the right level of feedback, at the right time, and to ensure high-quality software. One of the biggest challenges of building a test automation framework that works on a long-term, scalable basis, is that it requires fundamentally different conditions compared to a predominantly manual testing approach.

The goal of DevOps is to streamline and automate your whole software delivery lifecycle. A successful DevOps testing plan for most businesses begins with implementing the agile best practice of Continuous Integration (CI), in which developers check code into a common repository numerous times per day. DevOps test engineers are team members that are in charge of testing in a DevOps setting.

Jira is one of the most popular task management products available today, and for good reason: it's been around for a long time. The team at Atlassian is constantly working to improve the way users can utilize their software, but for a long time if you wanted to integrate with Jira as a developer, your options were generally limited to the Jira API.

Automated visual regression testing tools check for style issues and problems with the visual layer of an app or website. The benefit of these tools is that they can catch issues on the visual layer (the user interface of the website or app, which customers see) that may get missed by test scripts that only interact with the underlying code (the DOM).

For those not familiar with the acronym MTTR, ‘Mean Time to Recovery’, is the average time your organization takes to bounce back from a product or system failure. All DevOps stakeholders want this number to be low, as it is a good proxy for your organization’s ability to understand and improve its overall processes. Also, low MTTR scores are strongly correlated with customer satisfaction ratings! But we aren’t talking about DevOps metrics today.

We’ve added the functionality to add notes to your load test results. This functionality applies to Load Tests and JMeter Load Tests. It’s super simple to add/edit/remove notes for any of the test runs of the same test in order to caption various changes of your test runs. You can easily compare any test run with a baseline.

According to IEEE Spectrum Python is the top programming language of 2021, and since April Loadero supports Python as a test script language. Many engineers agree that test automation with Python is an excellent choice, and in this blog post, we’ll show the basics of it. Python tests in Loadero use the Py-TestUI framework. Py-TestUI wraps and implements additional features for Selenium Python binding.

Happy New Year Katalians! We hope you had a great holiday season and have enjoyed a productive start to 2022. Here at Katalon, we’ve been hard at work preparing the first 2022 release of TestOps. This release includes support for the public release of Katalon TestCloud and test suite creation and execution from within TestOps. Read on to learn more.

To stay on top of the software testing game, QA teams have to keep up with the industry’s evolution. Here are some key findings from The State of Quality Report 2022 that highlight the critical testing trends and practices to test effectively in 2022.

One of the most important phrases of DevOps practices is “Test early, test often.” It’s crucial to perform functional testing early with unit tests and integration tests. But it’s equally important to perform non-functional testing. That means you should have performance tests. As markets become more saturated with each passing day, you no longer have the luxury to postpone performance testing until all features are developed.

Digital transformation has been characterized by an insatiable appetite for new content and capabilities. Today, customers expect brands to not only deliver compelling digital experiences, they want those digital experiences to be continuously refreshed, improved, reimagined. It is therefore no surprise that software delivery velocity is becoming the barometer for digital product teams. But this need for speed cannot come at the price of quality.

Yesterday, Testlio officially announced a revolutionary new methodology for software quality: fused testing. This is a major milestone for our company. We are breaking down long-standing tensions between quality, speed, and coverage by seamlessly bringing together manual and automated testing through freelance talent, partnerships, platform capabilities, and strategic services.

Faced with skyrocketing consumer expectations and rapid industry shifts, 54% of development teams are struggling to keep up with software delivery. While organizations are turning towards automated testing to help bridge the gap between speed and quality, 64% of DevOps teams are struggling to find the talent needed to support those initiatives.

Test Automation is a software testing approach that uses automation technologies to control test execution rather than a human tester. The actual test findings are then compared to projected or expected outcomes. Automated testing improves productivity and reduces time-to-market for your initiatives.

The load test comparison feature build-in to LoadFocus Results allows you to compare the results of two different test runs of the same test for the cloud load testing service. You can visually compare the results between the test run set as baseline and the current test run, just by setting a test run as a baseline, and loading the other load tests runs. Baseline comparison is important because it allows to easily find differences in performance for the test runs.

One of the biggest challenges in a distributed-by-design company where people work from three different regions (Americas, Europe-Middle-East-Africa, and Asia-Pacific) is staying connected. Here’s an overview of ways we tackle it both company-wide and within teams.

Test driven development is a development process in which you write your unit tests before you write your implementation. The process looks like this This is sometimes referred to as the Red/Green/Blue cycle

Developers and Testers use exception handling framework to handle an exception in selenium scripts. The below diagram depicts the different types of Exceptions that we commonly face while working with Selenium WebDriver: Before understanding the different types of Exceptions which we may face while working with Selenium WebDriver, first I will explain the term Exception.

Here at Ghost Inspector, we’re continually rolling out changes that we think make our customer's lives better. Occasionally that means undoing some bit of logic we created or allowed in the past in order to move the product in a direction that makes it more powerful for everyone. We have a couple of changes coming next month that we think are going to be helpful to our customers, but they do change how some logic currently works.

Every mobile team, regardless of size, needs to invest time and resources into a robust set of testing practices. In this article, we'll present a quick-start guide to unit testing.

We all want our applications to run as smoothly as possible, but this isn't always the case. We need to know whether and when problems or exceptions are thrown after the application is up and running. As a result, there are several error tracking technologies available on the market.

As climate change has become a key global issue, software developers and DevOps experts reflect on their own industries to help reduce the climate impact of the industry. And, in our specific case, what can be done within static analysis tool development.

My grandmother used to say, ‘There’s more than one way to bake a cake.’ It’s a softer version of the more famous idiom involving feline taxidermy, but for our purposes, it’s a better metaphor. You can bake a cake without some of the key ingredients like sugar or eggs and it is still technically a cake. It just won’t taste as good as my grandmother’s cake did.

Flaky tests are automated software tests that sometimes pass and sometimes fail without an obvious reason. Often these tests will work well for a while, then occasionally start to fail. If the test passes on a second or third try without any obvious reason for the failures, the tester typically chalks it up to a glitch in the system and ignores the failed test result.

Read this hands-on guide to learn how to use the Bitrise Test Report add-on to visualize your test results for your development team!

We are excited to announce that Windows 11 is now available on Sauce Labs to run tests using Firefox, Chrome, and Chromium Edge. As your team looks to accelerate automated testing by running tests in parallel, Sauce Labs gives you the ability to test against the most recent version of every operating system, ensuring that you're maximizing your OS and browser coverage.

gRPC is a remote procedure call framework that has been widely adopted among cloud native applications. It is an attractive choice for engineers needing more capabilities than what REST APIs provide. However, observability and testing tools for gRPC are few and far between. Because of this, triaging or understanding application behavior is potentially time-consuming and overly burdensome.

Keeping up to the pace of software changes with good acceptance tests is challenging, and can often put a lot of pressure on the relationships between teams. Being able to detect issues faster and earlier in the development cycle is crucial to shipping good software quickly, but communicating those changes is always challenging -- and if software changes, so must the tests.

Communication is the key to managing the stakeholders. Many times, not enough efforts are made to communicate clear details, status, risks on the ongoing projects. On the other hand, not everyone can detail every important aspect or gauge what’s important to communicate without being subjective and setting aside all emotions during communication.

The software industry goes through a lot of research and modified methodologies that keep the software quality top-notch for the end-user. 2014 saw the trend of mobile app testing as they were becoming a multi-billion dollar business all over the world. 2015 saw the trend of scriptless testing and IoT focussed methodologies. Again, this was shaped by the market trends and the increasing importance of both of this software.

One day suddenly the whole world locked down to prevent the pandemic from being spread uncontrollably. When machines and factories were all stopped – your social media, mobile applications, and all the digital world was still operating at the same pace as before. Even if you did not notice, millions of developers and testers worked from their homes to keep you online and help you share your thoughts, purchase essential supplies and view live news.

Modern-day applications aim to cover a wide range of users’ needs in a flexible and scalable manner. The software development landscape is moving at a fast pace, and the competition is so fierce that a business simply can’t afford to offer a low-quality product. Thorough testing of both functional and non-functional aspects of a software application has become an essential step in the software development process. It ensures that users get the best version of your product.

COVID-19 has changed our lives in so many ways. There is not a single aspect of our life that is untouched by it. The way organizations operate their work has also changed drastically. Before 2020 no one would have guessed that work from home will become such an internationally accepted phenomenon. However, working from home has been a new experience for most of us, and there are times that we find ourselves struggling too.

​ One of the common challenges when doing performance testing is the difficulty of correlating the metrics of your application with your testing results. Having available QA, infrastructure, and application metrics together allows engineering teams to better understand the behavior of their systems during the testing, helping to detect and prevent potential issues in their applications.

If you want your QA to go above and beyond basic expectations, structured exploratory testing is the secret weapon to elite functionality and good UX. When testing web and mobile apps, executing functional, regression-based scripted test cases is the minimum standard for ensuring that your software performs as expected. However, scripted functional testing can only validate if the system works as intended and can easily miss edge cases you wouldn’t even think to test.

Your mileage may vary on Ryan Gosling films. I happen to be a fan, and I always chuckle during the climactic scene in The Notebook. Drenched in rain, Gosling says to Rachel McAdams’ character, “It wasn’t over. It still isn’t over.” He of course is talking about their relationship, but I could easily draw a parallel here with testing. While in the past it may have seemed that a tester’s job was done once code was pushed into production, that is no longer the case.

Recently we had a chance to work with several software testing teams to help them get started with their test automation endeavors. The teams consist of mostly manual testers, and some who had experience with test automation before, but none of them were familiar with programming like developers. The applications are mostly web based, with companion mobile apps.

Here at LoadFocus we provide an easy way of running your custom JMeter scripts from the cloud from various locations and with more than 20.000 users in parallel against non-secured and secured APIs.