July 2022 Summaries

The Monthly Sauce! from Sauce Labs is excited to share updates and insights on achieving quality at speed. The latest features include Mobile App Diagnostics for quickly determining the root cause of errors, API and network capture, app performance, error and crash reporting, and user interactions. Additionally, there are updates to Google Chrome version 100 on Android emulators, saucectl framework updates, and new support for various browsers like Chrome 102, Chrome 103, Firefox 101, Edge 102, Firefox 102, and Edge 103. The company also released a guide to automated testing from DZone and Sauce Labs, as well as a podcast discussing the importance of customer experience in software development. Furthermore, they highlighted the strategic value of testing in driving business results and delighting users, and provided resources on low-code test automation and how to choose mobile devices for testing.

Contract testing is a fast and lightweight form of API testing that checks the content and format of API requests and responses. It's designed to monitor the API conversation between the consumer and producer, ensuring both sides respect the contract, which is a formal description of the rules governing the interaction. This approach helps teams accelerate API-first development while reducing costs by minimizing false-negatives, rollbacks, test bottlenecks, errors in production, and more. By automating contract test writing and maintenance, contract testing provides instant feedback during early stages of design and development, allowing developers to gain confidence in sending releases to production and quickly diagnose and repair issues. It's particularly beneficial for microservices programs with exponentially increased test cases, enabling teams to scale contract testing without disrupting workflows and providing isolation of the consumer side to reduce the scope of an issue.

Every experience matters and so does privacy`: Sauce Labs has achieved the ISO 27701 certification, demonstrating its commitment to customer data protection and privacy. The company's rigorous risk management procedures and systems ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information, satisfying global privacy laws such as the California Consumer Privacy Act and EU GDPR. This step reinforces Sauce Labs' stance that digital experiences should be delightful for end-users while maintaining a secure environment, crucial in today's digital landscape where consumers are increasingly concerned about data security. With defense-in-depth security measures and formalized IT Security policies and procedures, Sauce Labs aims to support its customers in their own data protection and privacy initiatives, championing their efforts when servicing their customers.

Selenium is an industry-standard open-source testing automation framework that uses XPath as a web element locator to automate cross-browser testing of web applications. XPath is a query language used to search for and locate elements in XML and HTML documents, making it the preferred locator when other CSS locators are not found. Selenium WebDriver provides methods to find dynamic web elements using locators like XPath or ID, Class, or other CSS selectors. While XPath can be clumsy to write, brittle, and awkward to reverse engineer, CSS selectors provide bindings that are easier to read and more closely integrated into the browser platform. With Python's high-level programming language environment, Selenium WebDriver provides the functionality needed to run cross-browser tests, allowing developers to use classes or functions to build continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines. To write a dynamic XPath in Selenium, log into the website, find the XPath extension, and use relative or absolute paths to locate elements based on their attributes, ID, name, tag name, class, or other attribute values.

The text discusses the historical example of the disastrous video game launch of E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial in 1982, which was blamed on rushed production and ultimately led to a large number of unsold cartridges being buried in a New Mexico desert. The article then shifts focus to modern-day examples of poor game launches, including Cyberpunk 2077, No Man's Sky, Fallout 76, and Star Wars Battlefront 2, citing common issues such as crashes, bugs, and missing features. It argues that the industry has become too accepting of mediocre products, with fans often waiting for patches and updates before playing a new game. The article highlights the importance of brand reputation, stating that one bad launch can harm an entire studio's future titles. It also notes that modern testing solutions like Sauce Labs and Backtrace can help developers find bugs early on, release high-quality products, and retain players. Ultimately, the text concludes that leveraging such tools is crucial for companies to make a great first impression in the highly competitive gaming market.

Choosing the right mobile test automation framework can be a daunting task, with numerous options available. To help organizations make an informed decision, it's essential to consider various factors such as organizational process, future needs, application type, requirements, integration, environment, teams, testing responsibilities, resource skill sets, budget, and community support. Popular frameworks like Appium, XCUITest, Espresso, Detox, EarlGrey, and Sauce Labs' Real Device Cloud offer unique benefits and limitations. For instance, Appium is a leading open-source framework that supports cross-platform mobile native test automation, while XCUITest is the testing framework that ships with Apple's XCode development system, offering comprehensive functionality for iOS app testing. Espresso is designed specifically for functional testing of Android applications, providing automatic synchronization of UI and faster test execution. Ultimately, selecting the right framework requires careful evaluation of these factors to ensure optimal support for specific scenarios and maximizing productivity and improving testing efficiency.

Contract testing is a lightweight form of API testing that focuses on ensuring the content and format of requests and responses conform to specifications such as Swagger or OpenAPI. It's useful for early stages of building or updating mobile apps or web platforms, where speed and cost are crucial, by providing a balance between risk and velocity. Contract testing can be beneficial in modern workflows with scattered stakeholders, but it has limitations, including the need for human error correction from isolated tests, unreliable performance testing on public APIs, and situations where data cannot be loaded into providers without using the API being tested. In contrast, functional and end-to-end testing are more insightful, focusing on how multiple APIs collaborate to achieve meaningful results, and can be combined with contract testing in an ideal quality workflow that balances velocity and time to market.

Selenium is an industry-standard open-source testing framework that allows developers to run fast and repeatable tests across all browsers and operating systems, supporting popular scripting languages such as Node.js, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, or C#. It has evolved from a single browser technology to a standard protocol for human-like interaction with browsers. Selenium 4 is the latest version, using the W3C WebDriver standard protocol, ensuring future-proof support across all browsers. It allows developers and testers to write test scripts in different programming languages that can run on various operating systems and browsers without modification. Selenium enables parallel testing, automates browsers, works across browsers, is up-to-date, runs almost anywhere, and allows customized testing, making it an ideal tool for automated testing.

Sauce Labs is announcing a free virtual event called the Next Testing for Good Workshop on July 12-13, 2022, designed to expand test automation skills and support Black Girls Code. The workshop features industry-leading testing experts discussing web, API, and mobile testing for Java, with attendees leaving with working code they can use immediately in their software development. This event is part of a series of hands-on workshops that extend existing knowledge and foundations of software development with test automation best practices. Sauce Labs encourages all attendees to donate to Black Girls Code, with the company matching donations up to $2500. The workshop covers topics such as web testing, mobile testing, and API testing for Java, and is part of Sauce Labs' commitment to expanding access to technology for everyone, everywhere.