The software testing landscape is a dynamic ecosystem, always evolving and changing as new technologies are harnessed to improve quality and the overall customer experience. As Sauce Labs is dedicated to providing its customers with the digital confidence needed to compete in today's competitive landscape, we are always looking for ways to validate that commitment. One of the ways we put our words into action is by protecting the data of our customers and doing everything we can to keep them safe.

It’s hard to overstate how challenging software development is today. The market for web and mobile applications is more competitive than ever. Customers expect their applications to deliver a flawless, beautiful, and intuitive experience every time. Hiring and retaining high-quality software developers and engineers feels next to impossible given the low unemployment rate for IT professionals (just under 2% in the U.S. according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).

Automated testing early in the pipeline for both web and mobile applications has become the standard for most development teams. Catching issues when they are faster, easier, and cheaper to fix provides tremendous value to a business both financially and through the improved quality of end-user experience.

In a perfect world CIOs, CTOs, devs and QA teams would be perfectly aligned. Software would always function the way it was intended, security breaches would be a thing of the past and the movie Top Gun 2 would stop being delayed. Unfortunately, the world is imperfect, but there is a silver lining. Today’s CIOs understand the importance of quality, speed and the value of software testing.

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.

“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.

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.