May 2023 Summaries

Kiran Chilakamarri, a Cypress Ambassador, shares his motivations and experiences within the Cypress community, emphasizing his desire to connect with experts and experiment with new features. He aids others by unpacking Cypress's capabilities through chat and community events, while highlighting his favorite features such as cy.intercept(), the Cypress test runner, and plugin integration. Kiran values best practices like caching and re-using sessions across tests and the retry ability feature, which he believes enhance efficiency. Outside work, he enjoys badminton and family time, and he is proud of leading his team in migrating complex platforms to the cloud. He advises new users to begin with learn.cypress.io and lives by a quote about gratitude and abundance. The Cypress Ambassador program aims to support and highlight advocates like Kiran through speaking opportunities and a personalized hub, while continuing to expand experiences and resources for its ambassadors.

Cypress Cloud has introduced a beta integration with Microsoft Teams, designed to provide engineering and quality teams with real-time visibility into Cypress test results during continuous integration (CI) processes. This integration addresses the challenge of unnoticed CI build processes by allowing failed or flaky tests to be immediately visible within Teams channels, ensuring timely attention and reducing delays in software development. Users can configure notifications to appear in any channel, showing counts of various test outcomes and enabling direct access to Cypress Cloud for detailed debugging information. Available to all Cypress Cloud accounts, the integration can be tailored per organization and project, offering control over notification conditions to minimize unnecessary disruptions. This new feature is aimed at enhancing collaboration and improving CI/CD efficiency, ultimately leading to faster and higher-quality software releases, as noted by Cypress Senior Product Manager Peter Stakoun. Users are encouraged to provide feedback on the integration's functionality and configuration via GitHub.

End-to-end (E2E) testing can often be hindered by issues such as fragile tests, late testing in the CI/CD pipeline, and lack of available test environments, leading to delays and inefficiencies. To address these challenges, the integration of ephemeral environments—also known as preview or temporary environments—into the software development lifecycle (SDLC) is advocated. These environments replicate the production environment, enabling full-stack, isolated, and independent testing early in the development process, which is known as "shift left" testing. At Shipyard, ephemeral environments are promoted as a solution that allows for testing before code merges, using tools like Cypress to run tests against remote environments and within CI/CD pipelines. This approach helps surface and fix flaky tests, allows for testing in parallel, and leverages database snapshots to identify regressions, thereby enhancing testing speed and efficiency. An upcoming webinar featuring experts from Cypress and Shipyard will demonstrate how to implement these practices to improve development velocity.

A recent webinar hosted by Cypress Cloud featured insights from experts Ely Lucas and Shawn Harris on best practices for integrating test automation into CI/CD pipelines, emphasizing the importance of splitting workflows into distinct jobs for installation and testing to optimize parallelization. The session highlighted how Cypress Cloud's features, such as Spec Prioritization and Auto Cancellation, enhance feedback cycles and efficiency. Attendees' questions addressed topics like integration with Jenkins, managing browser versions with Docker images, and utilizing Cypress Studio. Participants were also informed about the capabilities of Cypress Cloud in distributing test workloads and the need for specific plans to access advanced features. The webinar encouraged engagement with the broader developer community to solve issues collaboratively.

The Cypress Ambassador Spotlight highlights Alex Niculae, whose motivation for being a Cypress Ambassador stems from the opportunity to engage with Cypress's product and development teams and being part of a valued community that enhances software quality assurance standards. As an ambassador, he assists new users in adopting Cypress by implementing best practices and providing internal training to ensure a robust test automation suite. Alex appreciates the Cypress community and its documentation, and values the ability to run tests in isolation, which he considers a key best practice. During the pandemic lockdown, he dedicated time to learning coding and various test automation tools, including Cypress. To help newcomers, he recommends resources by Gleb Bahmutov and Filip Hric. The Cypress Ambassador program aims to support its advocates by providing speaking opportunities and resources, with a focus on highlighting the contributions of current ambassadors and fostering community spirit.

Bartosz Ciach, a Cypress Ambassador, shares his journey and motivations for promoting Cypress, a testing technology he embraced early on due to its user-friendly nature and capability to overcome common testing challenges like async-hell and flakiness. Ciach, who began using Cypress in 2016, has since become an advocate, recommending its use in his workplaces, speaking at national and global events, and conducting courses in Poland to help others enter the field of test automation. He highlights time travel debugging as his favorite Cypress feature and emphasizes the use of data-* attributes for writing reliable selectors as a best practice. Outside of his professional pursuits, he enjoys cooking, motorization, and traveling. Ciach is proud of his continuous professional growth, having achieved multiple industry certifications, and cherishes the impact he's had as a mentor in helping others advance in their careers. His involvement with the Cypress community includes a memorable meeting with Brian Mann, the founder of Cypress, which he considers a significant professional milestone. For newcomers, he advises hands-on practice, utilizing resources like the cypress-realworld-app, and staying informed through professional networks. Ciach's efforts exemplify the Cypress Ambassador program's mission to empower and connect its advocates globally.