Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

August 2022

[Webinar] Fused Testing: A Pragmatic Test Automation Journey

In this video, we’ll be discussing fused testing, a comprehensive testing method that can improve your software quality. Fused testing is a testing method that combines different testing techniques into one test plan. This allows you to test your software in a more comprehensive way and achieve better software quality.

A Celebration of 5 Billion Tests With a Data Deep Dive

The future is mobile. Maybe it would be more accurate to say the present is mobile. With 7.26 billion smartphones in the world, it’s not difficult to see why there has been such rapid growth in mobile app development over the past couple of years. When there is almost one mobile device per person on Earth, it becomes clear that this is an enormous market with seemingly limitless potential. Sauce Labs recently completed our 5 billionth test, a huge milestone and a number we are proud of for sure.

How to build a culture of quality - part 1. vision and narrative

Does your organization use testing as a catch-all safety net for quality? Testers can often become the gatekeepers and decision-makers regarding whether something is ready to be “signed off,” which creates silos and can slow down releases. Nowadays, there is a lot more talk and emphasis in the testing and QA industry about shifting towards a quality engineering approach to build quality-in, and for everyone to contribute to the overall quality of what is being delivered.

August 2022 Product News, Events, and Test Automation Insights

Welcome to The Monthly Sauce! At Sauce Labs, we believe that every experience matters. It’s what drives us to build products that equip our customers with digital confidence in the rapidly evolving world of software development. Read on to learn how our newest features and insights can help strengthen your testing.

The Most Useful 16 Chrome Extensions for Web Developers

The extensive library of open source, often-free, and always handy extensions available through Chrome’s marketplace makes Google Chrome one of the most versatile and well-beloved web browsers among web developers. Downloadable in an instant, Chrome extensions serve to build up a custom web browsing UX for each Google account holder. For work, play, or a mix of both, Google Chrome extensions help millions daily to streamline their lives.

Beginner's Guide To Test Automation With Java (TestUI)

There are many programming languages that can be used for test automation. Loadero supports 3: Java (TestUI framework), Python (Py-TestUI framework), and JavaScript (Nightwatch.js framework). Test automation with Java is quite popular, in fact, the second most popular framework of choice when it comes to writing test scripts in Loadero is TestUI.

Enterprise Enablement Team

Digital transformation initiatives such as S/4HANA transformations or DevOps can have a major impact on how we test, ensure, and manage quality. Traditional testing organizations continue to look for ways to increase speed and reduce costs. Test automation and continuous testing play an integral role in enabling these initiatives and bringing about positive changes.

Customer Experience Evolution - The Air Travel Story

It is a very well-known fact that if we have to identify sectors that are the most volatile and sensitive to even a small trigger in the social, economic, or political environment, the list will not be complete without the airline industry. Recessions, pandemics, regulations, and the like have hit the airlines like no other, and the industry is turning around slowly and gradually after a big, unprecedented shock.

The need to write an effective Software Bug Report

As mentioned when explaining how to write a software testing plan, every software development project is essentially restricted by its resources, its timelines, and the deliverables that it promises to provide. Because software firms interact with a wide variety of stakeholders, including investors, customers, and end users, they are required to provide software of the highest possible quality.

Enterprises Need to Deploy, Monitor, and Govern ML Models to Solve Real-World Use Cases

The hype about AI from a few years ago is undeniably a reality today, with every business searching for ways to take advantage of the potential long-term advantages. The number of businesses employing the top AI and data scientist teams to support their company performance is expanding daily, regardless of whether you operate a company that focuses on retail, finance, construction, or anything in between.

Foster collaboration across teams

The Continuous Testing Framework (CTF) is designed to describe the roles, processes, skills, and tools organizations will need to establish modern testing practices. Collaboration is a key component of a high-performing development organization. It enables organizations to ensure their teams are working together effectively as they scale up their testing. Consider how this collaboration would take place at the Team, Program, and Enterprise levels of an organization.

Evolve Your SAP Quality Assurance

The SAP environment and applications form the technology hub for many organizations. Out of the world’s 500 largest companies, 94 percent are SAP customers. The typical enterprise portfolio includes 2,000 to 3,000 applications in production—and an average transaction touches 83 different technologies. This complex, dynamic IT landscape presents significant challenges for QA teams.

How To Improve Mobile App Performance with Automated Testing

The market for mobile apps has become quite competitive. Mobile application testing is a must to ensure functionality, usability, reliability, and performance. Effective mobile app testing allows for early recognition of defects and enhances time to market. People spend a large part of their day on mobile apps, making it crucial to develop a great mobile app experience.

What Are APIs and How Do They Work?

APIs are a key aspect of our digital world and allow us to engage in digital experiences on our phones and computers every day. Every time you use an app such as Facebook or Instagram, check the weather or send an instant message, you’re using an API. So what are APIs? API stands for Application Programming Interface, which enables communication between two applications.

Enterprises Need to Deploy, Monitor, and Govern ML Models to Solve Real-World Use Cases

Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial intelligence (AI) are at the center of the hyper-competitive era in which change occurs with new technologies in the span of a single blink of an eye. Modern innovations like AI, predictive analytics, ML, and other digital disruptors are changing how businesses operate and how customers interact with brands in every sector of the economy. Moments of existential transition are becoming common for organizations.

How to leverage low code test automation to scale

Dev teams are stacked against an incredibly high bar of software quality, consistent end-UX, and tight release windows. While manual testing remains a cornerstone of quality, leveraging test automation enables enterprises to scale testing and meet demands for coverage and capacity. Low-code test automation provides a great place to start; it circumvents current challenges in talent pools, increases coverage, and iterates quickly.

Choosing an operating model

One of the major steps in our 8 Step Guide to Modernizing Your Testing Organization is selecting the right operating model for your testing team. Why? Because this is were you determine how your testing organization will actually run. This is where you’ll establish accountability and communication needed to continue testing innovation and maintain best practices.

Defining your test strategy

Accelerating your software delivery cycle is impossible unless you also accelerate and enhance your approach to software testing. In another article we described the eight steps of the journey to transform your organization into a modern testing organization. This article will focus on defining your test strategy. You’ll learn about the importance of adopting agile practices.

Stop Using TCP Health Checks for Kubernetes Applications

As developers, one of the most important things we can consider when designing and building applications is the ability to know if our application is running in an ideal operating condition, or said another way: the ability to know whether or not your application is healthy. This is particularly important when deploying your application to Kubernetes. Kubernetes has the concept of container probes that, when used, can help ensure the health and availability of your application.

Transform People and Practices to Become a World-Class Digital Engineering Organization

How to win the digital engineering game? According to Gartner, organizations that are winning this game are the ones that are using a wider range of products, architectural techniques, and services than the others. Software engineering leaders must motivate their teams, nurture talent, and change their cultures and methods of delivery to win the game. Read Cigniti’s blog to know more about how to transform people and practices to become a world-class digital engineering organization.

Channeling the Power of Automation in Medical Device Testing

According to Cynerio’s 2022 State of Healthcare IoT Device Security Report, 53% of internet-connected medical devices analyzed had a known vulnerability, while one-third of bedside devices had a critical risk. (Cynerio observed over 10 million medical devices at over 300 hospitals and medical facilities across the world). As per the findings, more than half of health enterprise-connected medical devices pose security risks due to critical flaws that could jeopardize patient care.

6 key metrics to determine product quality

Every organization knows what quality should look like for the products they work on. However, what’s the best way of knowing whether the obtained quality compares to the expected quality of the product(s)? Quality can be both quantitative and qualitative. Many questions could be asked to determine quality. For example, "How do you feel about the product you use? How easy is it to use? Does it behave as expected? Do customers keep coming back to use our product?

IDC Selects SmartBear as a Leader in Worldwide Automated Software Quality

We expect software to work. Slow mobile apps and buggy website functionality are unacceptable, given that two-thirds of us do our banking from a mobile app and a quarter of the workforce logs in from their home office. Low-quality, poorly designed software can undermine operational efficiency, create security vulnerabilities, and contribute to customer attrition.

Modernize testing in 8 steps

Why should you invest in software testing? And if you’ve already invested heavily in your testing program, why should you invest in modernizing your current practices and tools? If these are questions you’ve heard or asked yourself, take a cue from your peers, Gartner, and the World Quality Report. When you modernize your testing, you make it easier for IT staff and business stakeholders to collaborate in ways that lead to faster software delivery and better business outcomes.

Embracing ML-Led Digital Innovation for Sustainable Business Transformation

This has been the center of countless dialogues and debates for decades now. Some believe that institutionalizing innovation means conducting hackathons, investing in research and startups and promoting open office seating, and so on. Others say that innovation is about investing in new technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Blockchain, Intelligent Automation, or embracing new business models.

Considerations When You Mock APIs Inside of Kubernetes

Today it’s not unusual to see organizations having implemented mocking in their daily workflow, as mock APIs allow developers to speed up their development and not rely on external services. For those reasons and others, many engineers are looking to learn more about the mocked APIs and how they can best be implemented into their organization.

5 Ways Cigniti's Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) Model is Helping Global Companies Expand their Operations

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed how businesses in all industries and geographical areas conduct their business for years. A recent McKinsey Global Survey of executives revealed that organizations had sped up the digitalization of their internal processes and supply-chain interactions by three to four years. Additionally, their portfolios’ proportion of digital or digitally enabled items has increased startlingly by seven years.

Learning JavaScript through load test scripts

I'm the technical writer at k6. If you're on this site, you probably know what k6 is. But, to reiterate the essentials: When I started five months ago, I knew I had some work to do because: Really, my "professional programming experience" culminated in some shell two-liners. Fortunately, the k6 team gave me a set of challenges to get up to speed. In this article, I go over the eight challenges the k6 team gave me and present the ways I solved them (I don't promise elegance).

How to Test Autoscaling in Kubernetes

In an ideal world, you want to have precisely the capacity to manage the requests of your users, from peak periods to off-peak hours. If you need three servers to attend to all the requests at peak periods and just one server at off-peak hours, running three servers all the time is going to drive up expenses, and running just one server all the time is going to mean that during peak periods, your systems will be overwhelmed and some clients will be denied service.

API-first development and the case for API mocking

One morning, you realize you have a great idea for an API. You discuss it with your team, then start building out the business case and technical requirements. Where do you go from there? You could write out the business requirements for the API and then code it. Or you could describe your API in a specification language, like OpenAPI, and use that definition to improve your team's understanding of the API and do some early testing. But are either of these the best solution?

Video: Cloud Native Traffic Replay

With the introduction of new application platforms like Kubernetes, oftentimes the DevOps tooling around it needs to evolve. Cloud Native technology is powerful but complex. This 5 minute demo video shows how Speedscale provides production simulation capabilities so you can check for resiliency, quality and scalability in your Kubernetes clusters. You can record data and traffic in production and replay sanitized traffic on the fly against a new cluster.

How to Write a Software Testing Plan

New software has to be thoroughly tested before it can be released to the public. As such, a software test plan is essential. The software development process is not complete without a comprehensive test plan. It details the measures you'll take to guarantee that your product or feature will function as intended and won't fail at the worst possible time for your customers.

A Shift from Project Centric to Product Centric Operating Model

– Thomas Schranz, CEO and Product at Blossom Over the past few decades, traditional approaches to software development have transformed from traditional waterfall methodologies to agile, which enabled development teams to focus on most viable products (MVP) for early stage demos with customers. Early feedback made teams product market fit and improved client satisfaction. With a faster time to market, digital enterprises have a competitive advantage.

Managing Frequent Software Testing Error Types

The true purpose of Software Testing is to check that a product satisfies its standards or, more generally, to report on any discoveries that diminish the consumer experience. The function of a error in these more ambitious corporate objectives is more complex. Before you can release your application, you must demonstrate that it functions well and is free of bugs In the language of testing specialists, "error" often plays the role of the enemy.

How to automate delivering Unity apps to testers with CI/CD

TL;DR: It’s critical to deliver the latest builds of your Unity game to testers and stakeholders. You can automate this process by setting up a Codemagic CI/CD pipeline and either using public Codemagic dashboards to access build artifacts or setting up notifications in Discord with links to builds and release notes. Let’s see how we can use automation tools to share our game builds with QA testers and stakeholders!

Testlio Attains Leader Status in G2 Automation Testing Category

Fused testing and stellar service drive another quarter of positive client ratings across categories August 15, 2022 — Testlio, the originator of networked testing, is now an Automation Testing Leader in the Summer 2022 Grid® Report — a first for the company, which was founded to evolve crowdtesting and provide better support and opportunities for manual testers.

Are you ready to take on QA automation?

Modern engineering and product teams must meet an increasingly high bar for quality and speed. While QA automation is marketed as a quick way to increase cadence to meet consumer demands, fusing manual and automated strategies creates a more effective, failsafe approach. Automated testing ensures consistency and immediate test execution, while manual testing offers flexibility and actionable insights.

How to Test Web Applications Manually: A Beginner's Guide

Manually testing a website can be as simple as opening a web page or application in a staging environment, manually clicking through a list of test cases, and marking whether they passed or failed on a spreadsheet. And in fact, that's where most software teams start when they first invest in QA.

Set up and Configure NeoLoad Controller and NeoLoad Web

Get started with NeoLoad by watching this video about how to register for NeoLoad Trial as well as how to setup and Configure NeoLoad Web. You will also see the steps you need to take to download NeoLoad Controller and get the License via NeoLoad Web and install root certificate to get started with NeoLoad.

Observability trends and future best practices, with Daniel González Lopes (k6 Office Hours #59)

What are some observability trends and best practices in 2022 and going forward? Technical Program Manager Daniel González Lopes joins Developer Advocates Nicole van der Hoeven and Paul Balogh to chat about trending concepts and new areas of exploration in the field of observability. We're going to talk about distributed tracing, continuous profiling, eBPF monitoring, and more!

FIX - The Mainstay of Electronic Trading Protocols

Communications on electronic trading platforms are based on well-defined protocols. These protocols are in standardized format for the “Exchange of information” between the systems. Electronic Exchanges have completely different protocols that they presently expose as their E-Trading interface as below.

Top 5 Continuous Testing Tools to Speed Up Release Cycles

Continuous testing is the practice of testing software as frequently as possible (e.g., multiple times per day) and as early as possible in the development lifecycle. With more frequent updates and faster bug fixes, your product can be more responsive to market changes and the needs of customers.

What is Cross Website Tracking | A Guide to Cross-Website Tracking

When the 2020 documentary, ‘The Social Dilemma,’ directed by Jeff Orlowski, dropped on Netflix, it sounded the alarm bell that was already ringing loudly. It highlighted the familiar quote among millions of viewers globally by driving the point of how Big Tech has been misusing our data without our consent. The documentary came in a backdrop of tumultuous times – with the CEOs of Google, Facebook, and Twitter questioned by the US Senate Judiciary and Senate Commerce Committees.

What Is Cross-Browser Compatibility Testing?

Cross Browser Testing is a sort of testing that determines whether an application works as anticipated across several browsers and degrades seamlessly. It is the process of ensuring that your application is compatible with many browsers. We've all seen that some websites don't display properly in certain browsers, leading us to believe that the website is malfunctioning. However, when you open it in a different browser, the page loads perfectly.

Top 10 Software Testing Tools for Functional Testing

There are dozens of software testing tools available in 2022 — and they’re not as similar as they may seem on the surface. To choose the right tool for your team, you need to carefully consider the technical skillset of your team and the complexity of the application you’re testing. In this article, we discuss four questions to consider in order to understand the differences between tools.

How To Contribute To Testsigma Open Source

This guide is designed to help contribute to Testsigma, an open-source tool that supports end-to-end testing for Web Apps, Mobile Apps, and APIs. Spoiler Alert: You don’t always need to be a programmer to make a contributor. There are many opportunities for coding as well as non-coding contributions. This article discusses all aspects necessary to contribute to Testsigma’s open-source project.

Sponsored Post

Datadog & Speedscale: Improve Kubernetes App Performance

By combining traffic replay capabilities from Speedscale with observability from Datadog, SRE Teams can deploy with confidence. It makes sense to centralize your monitoring data into as few silos as possible. With this integration, Speedscale will push the results of various traffic replay conditions into Datadog so it can be combined with the other observability data. Being able to preview application performance by simulating production conditions allows better release decisions. Moreover, a baseline to compare production metrics can provide even earlier signals on degradation and scale problems. Speedscale joined the Datadog Marketplace so customers can shift-left the discovery of performance issues.

Transform People and Practices to Become a World-Class Digital Engineering Organization

Digital transformation is not only a technology strategy, it’s a plan to use technology to enable new business models, new products and services, and new strategies – and to drive business growth. However, to seize the potential, software engineering leaders need to think beyond technology and data and move their organizations forward into the digital age. For software engineering leaders, digital technology initiatives are of the utmost importance.

What is Perforce Helix DAM?

Helix DAM is digital asset management by Perforce — makers of the industry standard version control system for game development, Helix Core. Helix DAM empowers teams to streamline creative workflows. It allows them to find, track, and review art assets — including 2D, 3D, audio, and video files — all in one place. It’s art & game asset management for creatives, built with the speed and security of Perforce Helix Core.

A Tester's Gambit

Hello Folks, Great to meet you all with another interesting blog. There are many relationships between Games and Testing. Many people use that as a metaphor and define testing. Why is it so? Every game requires strategy and analytical skills to play and win. In today’s blog, I will be explaining how chess and the pieces in chess are related to software testers and what we learn from them. Chess is one of the brilliant games. No one could deny it.

Smart ways to use XPath in Selenium - [2022 Updated]

Locators in Selenium test automation help to find the unique DOM elements. There are different types of locators CSS, ID, Class, XPath, etc. The XPath Locator is the most commonly used in test automation. XML Path Language is popularly abbreviated as XPath, it locates the element uniquely in the DOM tree. In test automation, Locators and Selectors are used interchangeably.

Setting up a Multi-Architecture Kubernetes Cluster

In the last post we covered the industry shift towards ARM machines for both local and production software engineering. Last time we learned how to create Docker images that would work on multiple architectures for dev machines. Now we want to take this portability and leverage it for cost savings in production. You may be able to transition some of your services into multi-architecture builds.

Six automated software testing services to boost your QA strategy

Modern engineering and product teams feel the pressure to accelerate the feedback loop to developers, shorten release cycles, and deliver high-quality results quickly. For many, fusing manual strategies with automated software testing services is part of the solution to ensure consistency and immediate test execution. We agree!

How to handle iFrame in Selenium

iFrame is the most commonly used HTML Element to display or embed a complete web page into a new window. The iFrame element is used in all modern websites and has many advantages over other types of coding. iFrame comes with many benefits. Over the years, many websites have used iFrame. Despite it being a common practice these days, browsers still view iFrames with suspicion and don’t allow any 1×1 DIVs inside an iframe.

UX & Testing: UX Lessons Learned From My Real-Life Experiences - Part 1

The key differentiator that distinguishes good software from outstanding software is the user experience. Software testers should go beyond just checking the functionality of the product. Software Testing is one of those fields where the more you know the better it is. Testers need to be generalists to be effective at work, someone with broad knowledge across many topics and expertise in a few.

Automated and Manual Testing with Zephyr Enterprise

Comprehensive software testing has never been more important than it is today. Software will continue to play an essential role in our daily lives. What is changing – and will continue to change – is what we test and how we test it. Modern software codebases are immensely complex. It’s simply not feasible to execute all of the necessary test cases manually. The bulk of testing today is automated.

Change and Impact Analysis in the SAP World and its Relevance to Testing

Change is inevitable in SAP applications. Digital transformations, business process re-engineering, functionality enhancements, configurations, customizations, and more will always trigger changes in SAP applications. If changes are unknown to other business teams, it will be a tedious job to find out the business impacts. Hence, the changes in SAP applications need to be analyzed properly and the impacts need to be diagnosed effectively, says Suresh Patnayakuni, Associate Director, Cigniti Technologies.

Will AI power the next wave of testing transformation? Here's what 2,600 DevOps professionals had to say

Year after year, DevOps industry reports and practitioners in the field point to testing as the biggest bottleneck in the software development lifecycle. Take GitLab’s 2021 Global DevSecOps Survey – for the third year in a row, the majority of respondents pointed to testing as the biggest cause of delays. That’s a lot of finger-pointing. If we had to guess, testers are tired of it.

Unlocking the value of tester-developer collaboration

In the era of digital transformation, misalignment between the business leaders steering the overall strategy and the technical experts who build, implement, and maintain solutions is one of the top blockers to a successful sea change. These groups need to be able to collaborate to define what each solution requires and the why behind it.

What Is Exploratory Testing and Why Is It So Helpful?

We are sure you've heard of Exploratory Testing, and you've probably heard about how amazing it is. (Yes! This is the weapon of choice!) And you may believe you know all of it. You're doing it, your team is doing it, therefore everything should be OK; according to the great book of plans, you're all set.

Your 2-minute intro to Tricentis Data Integrity

Tricentis Data Integrity brings the discipline of end-to-end, continuous, and automated testing to the world of data, enabling you to catch more data errors upfront and prevent the costly downstream consequences of bad analytical and operational data. Built into the solution is a unique model-based automation technology that enables you to create, maintain, and execute data quality tests at scale and speed—so you can keep your data great as your business and technical landscape changes.

Change and Impact Analysis in SAP World and Its Relevance to Testing

Enterprise customers have their business operations spread across the globe, and their business requirements change frequently to meet the everchanging customer needs. Business managers are frequently astounded by the lack of agility in their SAP applications. SAP support managers should optimize their change management processes to adapt to their live SAP business processes faster without compromising system integrity.

Open source Load Testing tools comparative study

When using a testing tool, it is only logical to trust its results. And the more well-known the tool is, the more trust we put in it. Furthermore, how could we know it is wrong? After all, who is in a position to judge the judge? This phenomenon is particularly true in the load testing community, since the field is still something of a niche among the testing world. Finding deep-dive studies about the actual technical aspect of load testing is difficult.