Red Hat announced a multi-stage alliance to offer customers a greater choice of operating systems to run on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
In today's digitally driven work environment, leveraging technology to improve efficiencies is an essential component of any modern business. This is especially true for those in the business of software.
As a business's software development life cycle (SDLC) continues to speed up, and more code is developed and deployed at a faster rate, testing that code for quality to ensure optimal user experience is critical. The SDLC is also only growing more complex, so finding ways to simplify and automate wherever possible are critical too.
That's why a modern SDLC should start with software test automation.
Inclusive Automation
Software engineers are well-versed in inclusive or universal design, creating a product that is usable by as many people as possible. This should be applied to software test automation too.
Traditionally, a software developer uses code to script automation. Problems can arise with this approach when testers don't have the technical understanding to maintain these tests or grow the scale of these tests as the software pipeline expands. Starting with inclusive codeless automation solves this challenge by removing the complicated coding part of the process.
Facilitating Automation
Validating software on both web and mobile applications can create unique challenges for software test automation. To avoid issues, it's important to create applications with inclusive automation in mind, including details baked into your code.
■ Every element has a unique identifier. Software test automation should act on these IDs, not something else, such as position on a page in mobile vs. web. Unique identifiers enable automation to act and do its job.
■ Content descriptions are used to explain an element's purpose. This helps distinguish between UI elements. This also needs to be part of standard automation testing.
Identifiers and content descriptions are not optional for developers looking to implement functional and advanced testing automation that doesn't break.
Limits to Software Test Automation
Codeless automation can handle complex situations, but it has its limits. Some tests are still better to be done manually. For example, any tests that involve data from two separate sources (like from APIs, which are very common for apps today), make it difficult to automatically validate. This is because individual apps behave differently. Synchronizing two systems into one for testing is challenging for any type of automation, not just codeless testing.
The Potential of Software Test Automation
Software test automation can empower organizations and their software development. But it isn't always easily embraced or added. One big reason behind this is that developers don't want to stop developing new features to pay down existing technical debt. So areas like refactoring or desiloing are put off.
Performance will eventually suffer if technical debt isn't paid down. In the long run, pausing development progress to implement automation will be worthwhile. Advanced automation planning and strategy should go directly into your SDLC and be a consistent effort to identify app elements and improve automation around them.
Industry News
Snow Software announced a new global partner program designed to enable partners to support customers as they face complex market challenges around managing cost and mitigating risk, while delivering value more efficiently and effectively with Snow.
Contrast Security announced the launch of its new partner program, the Security Innovation Alliance (SIA), which is a global ecosystem of system integrators (SIs), cloud, channel and technology alliances.
Red Hat introduced new security and compliance capabilities for the Red Hat OpenShift enterprise Kubernetes platform.
Jetpack.io formally launched with Devbox Cloud, a managed service offering for Devbox.
Jellyfish launched Life Cycle Explorer, a new solution that identifies bottlenecks in the life cycle of engineering work to help teams adapt workflow processes and more effectively deliver value to customers.
Checkmarx announced the immediate availability of Supply Chain Threat Intelligence, which delivers detailed threat intelligence on hundreds of thousands of malicious packages, contributor reputation, malicious behavior and more.
Qualys announced its new GovCloud platform along with the achievement of FedRAMP Ready status at the High impact level, from the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP).
F5 announced the general availability of F5 NGINXaaS for Azure, an integrated solution co-developed by F5 and Microsoft that empowers enterprises to deliver secure, high-performance applications in the cloud.
Tenable announced Tenable Ventures, a corporate investment program.
Ubuntu Pro, Canonical’s comprehensive subscription for secure open source and compliance, is now generally available.
Mirantis, freeing developers to create their most valuable code, today announced that it has acquired the Santa Clara, California-based Shipa to add automated application discovery, operations, security, and observability to the Lens Kubernetes Platform.
SmartBear has integrated the powerful contract testing capabilities of PactFlow with SwaggerHub.
Venafi introduced TLS Protect for Kubernetes.