August 2020 Summaries

Paul Grizzaffi presents "Ten More Commandments of Test Automation" that expand on the traditional commandments of test automation. He emphasizes treating automation development as software development, considering maintenance and upkeep, and following coding standards and idioms. He also highlights the importance of logging and reports, influencing testability and automatability, avoiding the sunk cost fallacy, and being mindful of Rube Goldberg machines that can be overly complex and hard to maintain. Additionally, he stresses the need to avoid making scripts dependent on each other and test data depend on transient data, and notes that automation is not limited to deriving from existing test cases. By adopting these commandments, testers and developers can create more sustainable and effective testing initiatives.

Mobile applications are becoming increasingly complex and require more thorough testing to ensure they work seamlessly across different devices, browsers, and operating systems. Manual testing involves human users interacting with the application to identify usability issues, while automated testing uses pre-scripted tests to check for functionality and errors. Both approaches have their validity depending on the situation and can be used together in a blended approach known as integrated testing, which combines the strengths of both methods. This approach is recommended by companies such as Sauce Labs, which suggests that 80% of testing should be automated and 20% manual to save up to 70% of time and money spent testing. Manual testing provides valuable feedback on usability and appearance, while automated testing speeds up the testing process and reduces costs, making it essential for frequent releases.

The Open Source Program Office at Sauce Labs aims to deepen the company's investment in the broader open source community by actively contributing to, developing, and leading open source projects that are critical to the community and the mission of Sauce Labs. The office will adopt policies that enable employees to easily contribute to OSS projects by understanding best practices of open source development. By participating in projects and communities that share their common goal, sharing knowledge and code, promoting engineering teams' work for the common good, and spreading the open source love within Sauce Labs and the broader community, the Open Source Program Office seeks to harness the collective power of the global testing and developer communities to develop and maintain the best software. The office is committed to creating a world of digital confidence through their efforts.

In a new video interview series, Sauce Labs CEO Aled Miles is joined by Carwyn Jones, former First Minister of Wales, in an informal conversation about leadership, politics, and life experiences. Aled Miles hosts the discussion as part of his "Unscripted" series, where he engages with guests from various backgrounds to share insights on digital confidence and business. The conversation also touches on a memorable encounter between Carwyn Jones and former US President Barack Obama.

CSS selectors are a powerful way to identify objects in WebDriver, allowing for more flexible and readable bindings that can be easier to maintain than XPATH locators. CSS selectors use a combination of element selector and value to identify web elements within a web page. Simple ID selectors use the "#" symbol, while direct child selectors use the ">" symbol. Child or sub-child selectors are denoted by whitespace. Classes are identified using the "." symbol. Advanced selectors include next sibling, attribute values, and pseudo-classes such as nth-child, which can be used to select specific elements within lists. Partial string matches can also be achieved using ^=, $=, and *= operators. While some pseudo-classes are deprecated or not supported by all browsers, many are implemented in the current CSS Selectors level 3 standard and can be used with Selenium for more efficient testing.

Hyperautomation is a market state where organizations must rapidly identify and automate all possible business processes, with automation efforts expanding to include software design, modeling, monitoring, analytics, robotic process automation (RPA), business process automation (BPA), and more. Low-code testing solutions are emerging in the marketplace, offering promise by democratizing these technologies and allowing practitioners to create and test application software without coding. These solutions represent a leap beyond record and playback tools and offer benefits such as scalability, reduced flakiness, and increased ease of use. However, low-code test solutions also come with limitations, including challenges in ensuring maintenance and sustainability of tests as the suite grows, and not accounting for all testing scenarios. Despite these limitations, low-code test solutions are poised to become more prevalent as the industry continues to progress with machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).

The C# Selenium Sample Repo is an excellent resource for anyone struggling with automation in C#. It offers best practices and answers burning questions about using Selenium with different frameworks. The repository provides production-quality examples of cross-platform and parallel testing, including how to run NUnit methods in parallel and use Appium for native app testing. Additionally, it covers W3C and performance testing, offering a wide range of options for automating C# applications. The demo-csharp repository is open-source and welcomes contributions, providing a valuable resource for developers looking to improve their automation skills.

Everwell Health Solutions`, a company that develops an open source platform to provide access to high-quality care for various health challenges, has reduced their testing time by more than 50% with the help of `Sauce Labs`. The company's testing environment was initially set up using multiple virtual machines and browsers, but it took around five hours to run tests. With Sauce Labs, they were able to reduce this time to just two hours. This is made possible by the cloud-based platform's ability to provide access to multiple Android emulators and desktop OS/browser combinations, allowing for parallel testing sessions. The company uses Jenkins as their CI tool and Appium and Selenium for test automation. By using Sauce Labs, Everwell was able to increase their ability to test a broader range of use cases in parallel and reduce their time to run tests, resulting in a faster test-deploy cycle.

Continuous testing is a crucial practice in the retail industry to provide a flawless digital experience and compete in today's fast-paced market. With the rise of online shopping, retailers must ensure their web and mobile applications are seamless, flexible, and secure, guaranteeing a positive customer experience. Continuous testing helps achieve this by detecting bugs early, improving code quality, and increasing release velocity, ultimately saving time and resources. By adopting continuous testing, retail companies like Walmart Labs can improve their digital confidence, increase revenue, and stay ahead of the competition.