(Cover photo by Florian Olivo on Unsplash)

You need to test your service APIs. You may expand your application into a service API. Or, you may consume someone else’s service API. How do you guarantee the behavior of your own service API? And how do you ensure that your application which depends on a third-party service API? Whether you develop your own service APIs or depend on others, learn to test your service APIs.

This imperative lies at the heart of the Test Automation University course, “Exploring Service APIs through Test Automation”, with instructor Amber Race (Twitter: @ambertests). We’re offering courses like this to help engineers like yourself think about, and improve, the quality of your services through test automation.Read more…

Next week we are joining test automation, Selenium and Sauce Labs power-users at the Hyatt Regency Austin for SauceCon 2019!

What is SauceCon? SauceCon (@saucecon, #SauceCon) is an annual conference hosted by Sauce Labs that brings together the software testing and test automation community to share, network and explore the latest trends and technologies in this space.

SauceCon 2019 takes place in Austin, Texas, April 23-25 and features speakers from companies like Charles Schwab, Fannie Mae, and the New York Times. We are honored to have Applitools test automation experts take the stage to share their insights on testing techniques and tools. Join us at the following sessions: Read more…

Abel Wang — Principal Cloud Advocate, DevOps @ Microsoft

Watch this on-demand session for an inside look at how Microsoft navigates DevOps in the era of CI-CD.

Abel Wang — Sr. DevOps expert @ Microsoft — discussed what DevOps is, why it’s important, and what products help MSFT solve DevOps challenges.
Abel also showed how Microsoft copes with, and solves, a major DevOps challenge: maintaining quality across its Dev/Test pipeline.

With 70% of companies citing CI-CD as a top strategic initiative, we no longer question the need for DevOps — but implementing a successful DevOps practice and maintaining app quality remain challenging for companies of all sizes.

At Microsoft, DevOps means something specific: DevOps is the union of people, processes and products enabling the continuous delivery of value to end users.
This union isn’t easy.
Aligning these three pillars takes careful planning. Making sure the right culture, the right software development processes, and the right products and tools are in place enables this comprehensive DevOps mindset.

Among the topics covered:  Read more…

Later this week, we’re joining test automation and Selenium experts and practitioners at the Tower Hall Funabori for SeleniumConf Tokyo 2019!

What is SeleniumConf? SeleniumConf (@seleniumconf, #SeConfTokyo) is a software testing conference held twice a year at various places across the globe, and hosted by our friends at the Selenium Project. Selenium Conf is known for featuring the top minds in test automation, sharing the latest updates and best practices on stage, through conference networking opportunities, and hands-on workshops. SeleniumConf Tokyo is taking place in Funabori, Tokyo, Japan, April 18-19.

We are proud to be taking the stage alongside prominent members and users of Selenium, as well as our test automation friends from all corners of the globe. Join us for three expert sessions: Read more…

What do you think are best practices for front end testing? On April 3, 2019, Adam Carmi, our CTO and Co-Founder, joined a panel discussed this topic on a This Dot Media webinar. The webinar title was “This.Javascript: State of Front End Testing.”  Moderated by Tracy Lee of This Dot, the panel included:

• Guillermo Rauch – Founder & CEO, Zeit (@rauchg, @zeithq)
• Gleb Bahmutov – VP of Engineering, Cypress (@bahmutov, @cypress_io)
• Simen Bekkhus – Developer, Folio (@SBekkhus, @folio, @fbjest)
• Adam Carmi – Co-Founder and CTO, Applitools (@carmiadam, @applitools)
• Kevin Lamping – Developer, Test Automation (@klamping)
• Vikram Subramanian – Googler, Angular Universal (@vikerman)
• Tracy Lee – Founder, This Dot & RxJS Core Team (@ladyleet ‏, @thisdotmedia)

The panel covered a broad range of test issues. Adam began his segment by zeroing in on a simple problem: how small changes can have huge impacts on front end behavior. Specifically, how can developers account for changes in their CSS?

Read more…

One of the great things about Slack is the long list of integrations available. Whether it’s an integration as foundational as Google Drive, GitHub, or Zendesk — or as whimsical as Lunch Train — there are Slack integrations for a wide range of use cases.

Here’s an example of Slack’s GitHub integration:

With that backdrop, we’d like to show you how to integrate your Applitools Eyes visual UI test results into one of your Slack channels — something that our customers have frequently requested.

Read more…

One of the perks of my job is that we have lunch brought in a couple of times a week. On those days, we’re all eagerly awaiting an email from our office manager with the link to a Doordash order form. We have less than an hour to get our orders in, so everyone stops whatever they are doing to make their selections before it closes. And of course, we’re all doing different things.

I’m a late bird, so I’m usually in transit to the office during this time. So, I need to make the order from my Android cell phone. And on some days, I’m watching videos when the pleasant interruption comes through, so my phone is in landscape mode.

Another coworker may be at their desk – plugged into a huge desktop monitor.

Someone else may be in a meeting and need to use their laptop to place their order using Chrome. There will be others in that same meeting who may be using Firefox or Safari. Then of course, there will be someone in the meeting who didn’t bring their laptop, so they’ll need to order from their iPhone.

Being a tester, I got to thinking “wow, that sure is a lot of configurations Doordash has to test”. All of us are accessing the same form from different browsers, devices, and viewports, and yet we all have the expectation of a flawless experience. Our lunch depends on it!

Read more…

Recently I’ve put together a bunch of tutorials: an overview of Applitools, how to test Storybook with Angular, how to quickly troubleshoot bugs in React apps, and how to test Vue apps with Cypress.

If you’ve gone through these, you’ll notice that the visual tests complete in seconds — faster than Nic Cage can jack your ride.

How so fast?

The answer is simple: Applitools Visual Grid. Each time you run a visual test in Applitools, Visual Grid renders that page across a broad range of browsers and configurations. In parallel. In seconds.

Read more…

Applitools provides an end-to-end software testing platform powered by Visual AI. It can be used by people in engineering, test automation, manual QA, DevOps, and Digital Transformation teams.

What does Applitools do? Find bugs that functional tests miss, like the one above.

That’s an actual visual bug from Instagram’s mobile app in March 2019. It’s a sponsored ad, meaning that one of Facebook’s customers paid good money for this placement.

How did this bug make it into their app?

Read more…

Amber Race – Sr. SDET @ Big Fish Games

“Watch this deep-dive session, where I demonstrate multiple methods you can use for collecting production data, as well as give real-life examples of how production data can help you find bugs, and even enable running tests in production.” — Amber Race

Our software doesn’t run in a test environment with mock users — it runs out in the real world, being used by thousands or even millions of real people, with thousands of variations of devices, screen sizes, and operating systems.

Learn why you need to be collecting this data — and how you can make it actionable for continuous testing, learning and improving, as well as how it can help you make your own services more transparent and user-friendly to your customers.

Watch this webinar by expert Amber Race — Sr. SDET @ Big Fish Games — and learn: Read more…

Later this week, we’ll be joining software testing professionals at the STPCon Spring 2019! The event will be held at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport in Burlingame, California from April 1-4.

What is STPCon 2019? STPCon 2019 (@SoftwareTestPro, #STPCon) serves the global software testing and quality assurance community, providing more than 50,000 professionals with information, education, and professional networking opportunities. It is a premier event where test leadership, management, and strategy converge. Test and QA practitioners gather from across the industry to discuss and amplify practices for agile testing, performance testing, test automation, AI, machine learning, mobile application testing, and test team leadership and management. Read more…

Next week, we’ll be joining FinTech leaders and IT pros at the 2019 QA Financial Forum in Chicago, Illinois.

What is QA Financial Forum, you ask? The QA Financial Forum (@QA_financial, #QAFF) is one of the leading conferences for software quality assurance professionals in financial services. An exclusive event, QA Financial Forum is a place where some of the leading domain experts and IT practitioners in financial technology convene to detail experience reports from their digital transformation journeys, value stream management, continuous app delivery, and more. The speaker line-up features companies like Charles Schwab, Wells Fargo, and JP Morgan Chase. This year, the event will be held at the Chicago Metropolitan Club in the Willis Tower on April 2.Read more…

Next week, we will be joining thousands of business marketing professionals at Adobe Summit 2019 in Las Vegas!

What is Adobe Summit? Adobe Summit (@AdobeSummit, #AdobeSummit) is the premier global digital experience conference, bringing together over 14,000 digital marketing technologists and professionals in Las Vegas. Attendees will learn, share, and discover the latest trends and strategies in transforming and delivering personalized, engaging customer experiences. Read more…

In my previous blog post, we explored how easy it is to troubleshoot and fix React bugs fast using React JS, Cypress.io, and Applitools. In this article, I’ll walk you through a complete, step-by-step guide of how to visually test a Vue JS app with Cypress.io and Applitools.

Read more…

This Friday, we’re joining Agile, Lean, and Kanban experts to share best practices in software development at the Virginia Crossings Hotel & Conference Center for Innovate Virginia 2019. Read more…

Later this week we will be joining global DevOps leaders at the DevOps Talks Conference (DOTC) in Melbourne, Australia!

What is the DevOps Talks Conference? The DevOps Talks Conference (@DevOpsTalks, #dotc19) brings together DevOps leaders, engineers, and architects who are implementing DevOps principles and practices in startups and leading enterprise companies from around the globe. The conference boasts speakers from companies such as: Google, Microsoft, JFrog and more! This year the event is being held at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (MCEC) March 21-22! Read more…

Paul Grizzaffi

Unleash your inner rock-star tester, and listen to this hard-rockin’ session with expert Paul Grizzaffi, covering the most important testing concepts and test automation best practices. Read more…

Next week, we’ll be joining software testing leaders at the 2019 UKSTAR conference in London, which will be held @ etc.venues, 155 Bishopsgate, Liverpool Street, London, on March 11 – 12.

What is UKSTAR? UKSTAR (@UKSTARconf, #UKSTARConf) is a leading software testing event in London that unites software testing and quality assurance professionals from all corners of the globe. Organized by EuroSTAR, the premier testing conference in Europe, UKSTAR Conf 2019 includes two days of innovative keynotes and breakout sessions covering tracks like Automation, Modern Tester, and Leadership. Read more…

Have you tried using the new Selenium IDE for your QA test automation?

People seem to like it…

HOLLY MOLLY ! This plugin is more than AWESOME . tried a simple test and ran super smoothly. Thanks guys amazing job. Must have for automation in 2019 https://t.co/Na8fqnQ7KP

— David Bernal (@DavidBBernal) February 26, 2019

Still skeptical? I get it.

There’s been plenty of stigma around using record and replay tools like Selenium IDE rather than scripted QA automation tools like Selenium Webdriver, Cypress, and WebdriverIO.

And rightfully so.

Traditionally, record and playback tools suffer from a litany of issues, including:

Read more…

This week, we’ll be joining FinTech leaders at the 2019 QA Financial Forum in London!

What is QA Financial Forum? QA Financial Forum (@QA_financial, #QAFF) has become established as the leading conference for software quality assurance and IT risk management professionals. This is an exclusive event that brings together some of the top minds in financial technology to share their digital journeys, best practices, challenges and more. The speaker line-up features companies like Bank of America, Barclays, and JP Morgan Asset Management. This year’s conference will be held at the Hilton Canary Wharf in London on February 27. Read more…

Watch this webinar, where Selenium Guru Dave Haeffner and Software Developer Tomer Steinfeld, showcase the New Selenium IDE.

In this webinar, you’ll learn how the newly re-factored Selenium IDE is guaranteed to augment your testing efforts, regardless of your team’s automation “maturity” level, or your personal technical knowledge or experience.

Watch this session with Dave Haeffner and Tomer Steinfeld – full-time maintainers of Selenium IDE — and learn: Read more…

We’re excited to share that Applitools has once again been named to the CB Insights 2019 AI 100!

This list represents the 100 most promising privately-held artificial intelligence (AI) companies in the world. These are companies using AI to solve big challenges, and we’re honored to be recognized alongside so many well-respected and innovative companies.

How did we make the list?

Read more…

Gil Tayar, Sr. Architect and Evangelist @ Applitools

Watch this in-depth session by Gil Tayar about how Test Engineers and QA pros can successfully collaborate with developers.

This webinar includes an extensive overview on test methodologies and types – especially for frontend testing – tips, tricks, and best practices on how to effectively test developer code, and how to decipher developer lingo.

The full webinar recording and Gil’s slide-deck are below.

“I will give a recipe that you can follow to ease your fear of the unknown: writing tests for developer code. At the end of this session, I guarantee that you will gain a deeper understanding of different kinds of tests, know how to decipher developer terminology, and learn how to write unit, integration, browser, and E2E tests.” — Gil Tayar. Sr. Architect & Evangelist

Read more…

In February, we’re joining test automation industry leaders at the 2019 Automation Guild Online Conference!

And as Platinum Sponsors, we are very proud to make it even more affordable for you: add coupon name APPLITOOLS when registering — and get 20% off your ticket!

Read more…

There is always a lot of uncertainty around which programming language to use when starting a new test automation project.  Should you go with the same language that the development team is using? Or should you choose a language that has an abundance of community support so that you can easily get help when stuck? These are critical points to consider.

What our data is saying

More than half of the top ten companies in software, financial services, and healthcare verticals have enhanced their UI test automation suites with Applitools’ visual validation. With millions of tests running in our cloud every week, we’ve observed interesting trends on how these top companies are succeeding with their test automation initiatives. We’ll share these insights in a series of blog posts, starting with this one.Read more…

Tomer Steinfeld has been working as a Frontend Developer with Applitools for over a year now. He’s an expert developer and the nicest of people! His currrent focus has been rewriting Selenium IDE from scratch to bring it up to date with modern web standards. It is now both a Google Chrome extension and Firefox add-on, is written in React and MobX and does very challenging things. These include recording user interactions, playing them back, supporting many types of UI selectors, supporting interaction with other extensions to extend functionality, emitting code and exporting it, dealing with security constraints, and much more.

We sat down with Tomer to find out what brought him to work in web development and Applitools, and how he continues to learn and build on his skills within his role.

Read more…

I’ve been playing around with Applitools for quite some time now, and I’d like to share what I’ve found to help you quickly troubleshoot React bugs and fix them fast.

Read more…

To better understand the Applitools Storybook SDK for Angular, here is a tutorial on how to build a small AngularJS application from scratch, adding some Storybook stories, and then finally performing visual regression testing using the Applitools SDK to generate snapshots for us to view and analyze.

You can find the source code for this article on GitHub by following this link storybook-angular-applitools repo.

Read more…

Kent C. Dodds – full-stack JavaScript engineer, PayPal

Watch this webinar with Kent C. Dodds about frontend testing, and prepare to re-think everything you think you know about shipping apps with confidence. We want to make sure that when we ship new code, our users can use the application. The best way we’ve found to do that is to write automated tests that run before we deploy a new version of the app.

But there’s a catch with frontend testing: if our tests aren’t doing exactly what the user will do, then how do we really know that things will work when users interact with our apps?

Expert Kent C. Dodds makes us rethink everything we know about frontend testing: what it means to ship applications with confidence, and what it takes to get there. With improved tools and practices, we can be more certain that what we’re shipping to our users will work the way it’s intended. Watch his full session right here:  Read more…

Take a guess: how long have we been dealing with software bugs?

It’s not 30 years, around the time Windows was first released.

It’s not 48 years, the start of the Unix epoch.

It’s actually much longer. 71 years and 2 days, to be exact. Here’s why.

Back on September 9, 1947, Grace Hopper, a Harvard computer scientist, was running tests on a calculator and found calculation errors. She did some investigation and found a moth that had landed between two solenoid contacts, shorting out an electromechanical relay. Apparently, the bug had been attracted by the warmth of the machine.

We now commemorate this occasion every September 9, Tester’s Day.

As you can see in her logbook entry below, dated September 9, the actual offending month was taped to the page. So not only is the first known example of a software bug, it’s probably the most tangible example of one as well.

The first known bug, via Wikipedia

Read more…