April 2018 Summaries

The concept of purposeful automation refers to the strategic application of automation techniques to specific tasks and processes that will yield the greatest positive impact on efficiency, speed, cost, and overall process improvement. Automation is not a one-size-fits-all solution, but rather a targeted approach that focuses on pivotal points and bottlenecks within a process. By identifying areas where automation can have the most significant effect, organizations can maximize their benefits while minimizing potential problems. Purposeful automation involves a careful analysis of tasks, processes, and integration levels to determine where automation can be applied to achieve the greatest value. This approach requires a nuanced understanding of the interplay between upstream and downstream effects, as well as a willingness to continuously monitor, test, review, and update the automated process. By applying DevOps principles to the DevOps process itself, organizations can unlock the full potential of purposeful automation and drive significant improvements in their continuous delivery pipelines.

Shift-left testing focuses on integrating QA with Dev early in the development cycle, while continuous testing synchronizes QA with Dev and Ops processes to achieve business goals. Continuous testing delivers more thorough results by enabling end-to-end testing, achieving earlier insights, providing better root-cause analysis, refining user experience, being proactive, and going all-in with DevOps. To take testing to the next level, shift-left is a building block but isn't enough; instead, transitioning to holistic continuous testing where frequent tests are distributed across the pipeline and real-world usage data is included is necessary.

Sauce Labs has released a series of commands that expand on the types of test cases that can be covered while testing on their platforms. This includes a tool that exposes Chrome's native network manipulation features, allowing for tests to be run in various network configurations without the need for a third-party proxy. The feature is implemented on the browser level, enabling users to perform assertions on the state of the app and maintain an active WebDriver/VM connection. This is particularly helpful for organizations with applications that require long periods of usage or remain open with unstable connections. The new functionality is included as part of the Sauce Labs Extended Debugging package and provides access to video recordings and logs, aiding in identifying bugs and delivering quality code at a faster pace.

The Sauce Labs Extended Debugging feature allows QA engineers to gain insight into network requests that can cause automated tests to fail, helping identify application problems before shipping a new release. This feature provides direct access to browser developer tools, enabling the tracking of performance issues and code optimization opportunities, as well as debugging flaky tests and using intercept requests, throttle, and more. It offers out-of-the-box features such as custom browser extensions, manipulation, and mockup of networking requests, receiving information about network events, intercepting and blocking requests, throttling, and log types. By building a strategy around Extended Debugging, QA engineers can focus on quality checking, analytics testing, and improving test coverage, ultimately building web applications with confidence and faster.

Continuous testing for mobile apps is essential due to their increasing importance in innovation, speed of releases, maturity of testing and available tooling. Mobile-first enterprises require continuous testing to ensure quality and speed, as they bring their own devices and interact with applications that are distributed across loosely coupled architecture. The DevOps approach emphasizes automation and speed, but also highlights the need for quality. Continuous testing addresses challenges such as fragmentation, visibility issues, and shifting left and right, by leveraging cloud-based solutions like Sauce Labs, integrating testing with CI tools, and utilizing test analytics and extended debugging. Implementing continuous testing brings a balance between speed and quality, takes into account device variability, and provides deep visibility into application performance. As mobile applications continue to drive innovation, continuous testing is no longer optional but essential for success.

Biometric data is a type of data that is based on the physical characteristics of a human being, including fingerprints, voice input, facial images, and iris scans. The integration of biometric data into mobile applications presents challenges for QA teams, such as collecting accurate real-world data, ensuring compliance and ethics issues, safeguarding user privacy, handling biometric input failures, simulating biometric data entry, and updating testing workflows to ensure reliable and secure use of biometric data. To address these challenges, QA teams must work alongside security engineers and legal advisors to develop strategies for addressing them through software testing, such as building a continuous testing loop, performing usability testing with biometric data, and ensuring backup input methods are available when biometric input fails.