Testing AI for Bias, Selenium 4.5, SRE Career, and More!

What's new in the latest version of Selenium? How do you test AI for bias? And want to know 6 Tips for Success in your SRE role? Find out the answers to these and all other full pipeline DevOps software testing, automation testing, performance testing, and security testing in 10 minutes or less in this episode of the Test Guild News Show for the week of October 9th. 

The Benefits of Visual AI in Testing

The awesome folks at Applitools sponsor this episode of the Test Guild news show. Applitools is a next-generation test automation platform powered by visual AI, which helps you increase quality, accelerate delivery, and reduce costs. Well, what I think is the world's most intelligent test automation platform. But seeing is believing.

👉👉👉 So, create your free account now before this offer ends.

First up, Automation News.

Time to Vote

You can now vote on what Automation Guild sessions you want at the 2023 event. Automation Guild is an attendee-led conference, so we only choose sessions the Guild has selected that YOU want to hear. 👉 Vote now, and I will start announcing speakers based on your choices in the next few weeks.

StarWest

I spoke at StarWest last week. And if you want to hear the whole expert roundtable session I had with testing experts Sneha Viswalingam, Prashant Patil, Eric Driggs, and Anthony Staffier, you can check it out now. Karate Labs sponsored this, but it was technology agnostic and had high attendee interaction.

SmartBear

One of the vendors at Star West was SmartBear, and I spoke to them about a new release of some integrations they have with Atlassian that I think you should know. Cynthia posted this announcement on LinkedIn and discussed 👉 integrating their most popular products into the Atlassian ecosystem. Some integrated tools are Bugsnag, SwaggerHub Integrations, and a few more. And it also talks about how SmartBear has a partnership with Atlassian open DevOps initiatives. So they have a lot of commitments to this. A lot of new things are coming out. So if you're using SmartBear, if you're using Atlassian, check it out now.

Selenium 4.5 Released

Also, a few weeks ago, Selenium 4.50 was released. I heard about this from a LinkedIn post by Sri Harsha. What's included? I recommend you 👉 read the changelog for your language binding to find out precisely what has been changed and updated. A lot of them are similar. But let's look at the Java one to see what is new:

• Supported CDP versions added: 85, 104, 105, 106 
• Allow the event firing decorator to accept a target class
• Improved default matcher to enable Appium
• Fix bug preventing WebSocket connections in Firefox v105 from localhost

Check out the change log for a complete list of changes.

Parasoft Event with Gene Kim

Another vendor I work with was at Star West, and they let me know about a 👉 virtual event they're hosting on November 3rd. So what's cool about this event is that Gene Kim, who wrote the famous Phoenix Project, will be the opening keynote. This event is going to cover all types of different software topics like:

• API testing
• Cloud testing
• Service virtualization
• Simulation of test environments
• API integration

I will also be one of the speakers in a panel session on Ways to Use Virtual Environments in Your Organization. 

CloudBees

In acquisition news, 👉 CloudBees acquired the ReleaseIQ DevOps platform. So if you don't know, CloudBees is a delivery platform for enterprises, and they announced that they got ReleaseIQ to expand the DevSecOps capabilities. The features include low code, end-to-end, release orchestration, and visibility solutions. And it sounds like an excellent acquisition for CloudBees because it hit on many points that I've also seen as significant trends in this area.

AI Bias

AI is a hot topic, but an area that needs improvement is 👉 how do you test AI bias within these AI algorithms. And one of the leaders in the AI testing space is Jason Arbon, who shares a must resource to help. This PDF details each stage, steps, and things you could do to reduce bias as much as possible. Jason is a must-follow leader in this space and has real-world expertise. So any time he speaks --, I listen.

 Testing Success in any Economy

Another upcoming event I heard about at Star West that Applitools is running on October 27th is the Future of Testing. The focus of the event is building for success in any economy. Leaders facing fewer resources and budgets can learn about different tools to continue scaling operations. Practitioners can learn how to make themselves valuable to the team.

Topics include: How to test more with less, Why accessibility should be your latest portfolio update, Strategies to keep your team relevant in current times, and more. 👉👉👉 Register now, and I will see you there.

Next up, Performance and Site Reliability News.

$$ Unravel Data $$

Unravel Data raises 50 million series D funding. Unravel Data, if you don't know, is 👉 a DataOps observability platform to meet the needs of modern data teams. And it's trying to accelerate the next generation of DataOps observability. Observability on the show has been heavily covered. So this is just some indication of where the market is going. If they're investing money in it, it's something you should pay attention to. And one of the reasons why this is such a hot topic is that the given article is about how large enterprises face the challenges of operating an overwhelming number of data pipelines used for data products, advanced modeling, and critical business reporting. And at a time when the complexity of data systems is heightened by the shift to multi-cloud strategies and burdened by overprovision environments, then this solution helps you connect the dots from every system in the modern data stack within and across the most popular data ecosystems your company probably uses to give you insights that you're probably definitely missing. 

SRE Career Change?

Ever wonder what an SRE role is all about? Well, here are six tips for success in an SRE role. If you're thinking of making the jump over, if you recently made the jump, or if you want to know how to get better in your current position, 👉 this article goes over how Site Reliability engineering is in high demand. And here are some tips to help you have some fast growth in this area. And it goes over six ways to do so:

1. The first one is how to prepare to report IT operations. 
2. The second is to drive observability tools across the business.
3. The third is to tap into dev and ops skills.
4. Four is energized and engaged.
5. The fifth tip is to look for a pay boost and apply for SRE roles. 
6. And six is how to build your SRE skillset. 

So if you've been thinking about switching to an SRE role, check out this article for more info.

Next up, security testing news.

Free Security Tool

This article comes your way via Vandana Verma, who's one of my go-to resources for all things security. And she mentions how 👉 Snyk just released a code checker that she's excited about. So she's excited about it. You should be excited about it. Not only is this online code checker tool new, but it's also free and allows teams to check code security before a PR commit and receive alerts of critical bugs. Such a great initiative. Thank you, Snyk, and Vandana, for pointing this out.

PyNT

I love how software testers, in general, are getting into the security testing space. This is just one of many examples. Sanjay Kumar, the creator of Selectors Hub, recently posted about a new tool that helps with API security testing. This tool is called 👉 PYnT and it's a new security testing solution that automatically builds API security tests out of your functional test stack. Not only that, but it also integrates with Postman and provides results in minutes. You can try it for free. Check it and let me know what you think.

That's a Wrap

So that's it for this Test Guild News Show Newsletter edition. 

I'm Joe Colantonio, and my mission is to help you succeed in creating end-to-end full-stack Pipeline automation awesomeness. Click to get my 10 test automation tips. 

As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.

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