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Introducing SmartBear’s First Podcast Series

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smartbear podcast the good the bad the buggy

We’ve all been there — you download a new mobile app or you go to a new website. You’re excited about the prospect of trying or buying something new. You tell everyone you know about the promise it holds, only to be disappointed. Or not — it comes down to your user experience.

From when a user first touches your app to when they leave, they are internally judging, evaluating, and considering whether they’re willing to spend their valuable time and energy on coming back again.

More than ever, companies are depending on their digital assets to drive the reputation of their brand, and exceptional software has become a foundational part of a positive user experience.

At some level, we all know and recognize this. However, those of us who work at SmartBear are even more acutely aware of how technology influences these everyday interactions.

When over 6 million software professionals and 22,000 companies across the globe use SmartBear tools to develop, deploy, test, and maintain some of the world’s most innovative applications, we know that the standard of quality can make or break your success.

This is the very inspiration behind SmartBear’s very first podcast series, “The Good, the Bad, and the Buggy.”

Our very own Alex McPeak and Bria Grangard will be sharing their own stories, talking to guests, and analyzing different case studies to consider what works and what doesn’t when it comes to online user experiences. Because a lot of the time, quality is in the details.

We hope this series encourages software teams to take a second look at their own projects to determine: is it good, is it bad, or is it buggy?

Listen to the first three episodes on SoundCloud now.

Don’t forget to share with your friends, coworkers, and family, and provide your feedback!

Additionally, you’ll want to check back often because we’ll be releasing a new episode bi-weekly.

Have feedback, an episode idea, or want to be featured as a guest? Reach out to Alex on LinkedIn.

The Top 8 Things We Learned From the QA Team at America’s Test Kitchen

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Americas test kitchen quality assurance

With three core websites, America’s Test Kitchen has a lot of content to cover. Yet when Megan Collins came on as QA manager, she was the only tester. Since then, America’s Test Kitchen has exponentially scaled their testing, adopted an automation strategy, and expand the QA team to three members, including Automation Engineer Michael Ng.

We recently had Megan and Michael join us for a webinar to talk a little bit about the web testing strategy behind America’s Test Kitchen and how they handled their shift to automation with the help of CrossBrowserTesting.

Here are the top 8 things we learned in the webinar:

  1. Fast deployment schedule demand testing — Most organizations dream of achieving the agility that America’s Test Kitchen has reached, deploying code to production every two days. But when you’re integrating as often as they are, you can’t just rely on developers to test each others code or you’ll never achieve consistent test coverage. By bringing in Megan Collins as QA Manager, she was able to spend her time on something that had been severely lacking — testing. This way, proper exploratory tests could be performed when there are any changes to code, and the development team can continue working doing their jobs instead of worrying about the intricacies of whether a new feature works or not.
  2. Real devices matter – When discussing emulators, simulators, and real devices, there’s a time and place for each one. In fact, Megan mentions that the developers on her team use emulators. However, the only way to see exactly what your users are seeing is to use real devices, which is why they are so important to the QA team. In fact, they even ran into a bug where membership details weren’t displaying for a user that wasn’t found on the emulator they were using — they noticed it once they performed the test on a real tablet device. While emulators are highly accurate, they do not replace real devices, and this is a large reason why they need a tool like CrossBrowserTesting that includes all three in order to prioritize both speed and accuracy during mobile testing.
  3. It’s important to understand different user journeys – The success of the America’s Test Kitchen QA team has a lot to do with their ability to identify the different users they have and how it affects their testing. Because a lot of the web content they have is for members only, there are paywalls that occur when someone accesses from a non-paid account, for example. By separating user states into two focused areas for their automated tests, static and dynamic, Michael is able to create more precise tests for different parts of the website. Understanding that they need to test different based on whether users are new, registered, on unsubscribed helps them build out different test cases and scenarios.
  4. Capture tools can help prove a point – Sometimes seeing is believing, and it can be hard to convince other team members of a bug they haven’t seen for themselves. Tools like CrossBrowerTesting’s screenshots and video capture help the America’s Test Kitchen QA team build out their test reports to include visual evidence of different occurrences during tests. This way, Megan doesn’t have to repeat the test case or find it on the right browser when she shows it to development, she can just show the screenshot or video instead so bugs get fixed faster. Additionally, by using the screenshot comparison engine, Michael has been able to create an archive of each homepage over time so it’s easy to show what changes in each regression.
  5. Use automation to make your life easier – America’s Test Kitchen isn’t automating every single test on their website. In fact, manual testing is still a large part of their strategy. Automation comes in mostly with repetitive tasks that take up a lot of time. For example, they use automation to sign in as a member in order to see whether content can be viewed instead of going through the actions of logging in in every time. This saves Michael valuable time in performing different test cases under different user scenarios — instead of replicating the same actions every time, he can focus on how each test differs.
  6. Collaboration is key – We say it over and over again, but communication with your team is important to productive testing. By leveraging tools for organizing your tests, taking notes, and tagging, it’s easier to remember which bugs you’ve encountered before and which are new. Additionally, keeping open communication with the development and design teams has been essential to America’s Test Kitchen for understanding priorities, risks, and hot spots for more insightful testing. Megan and Michael have found collaboration with the development team to be especially crucial in the shift to automation — learning new skills, choosing what to automate, and being notified when new code is added.
  7. Test while you sleep – Many of the automated tests that the America’s Test Kitchen QA crew create run at night, meaning that you literally can test in your sleep. Overnight testing is at the crux of their Selenium strategy, meaning they can check tests in the morning to see if they pass or fail. Because they have so many tests that run for an extensive amount of time, they rotate their browsers each night to get coverage of all the different configuration their users are on to see which tests are failing on which browsers. By running these regression tests, they’re able to test a subset of test cases across different pieces of functionality that they need to make sure are working day to day.
  8. Tests are only as good as how much time you put into them – Michael runs a lot of automated tests, but he also spends a lot of time maintaining them. The America’s Test Kitchen QA team emphasizes that maintenance is crucial to the success of the project. This is one of the main reasons they have a dedicated QA automation engineer. In order to ensure that Selenium tests aren’t just been created left and right, Michael spends a lot of time on each one to make sure it is accomplishing his goals (and may even be a few steps ahead of Elon Musk in this way).

Megan and Michael gave us a great look at how they use automated and manual testing to further the goals of America’s Test Kitchen. By taking the time to learn from other successful QA teams such as this one, you can apply some of their practices to your own testing strategy.

If you want to view the full webinar, you can watch below.

Pair Testing: Working Together to Define Quality

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pair testing

When you think of software testing, you probably think of an individual sitting at their computer performing manual tests or maybe writing up a Selenium script. In this scenario, they are also the sole person providing feedback on the test case and recording any notes or documentation.

However, pair testing is a little different, and it’s gaining popularity among the testing community.

So what is pair testing, why would you want to do it, and how do you do it right? A

What is Pair Testing?

It takes two to tango, or pair test. Pair testing is usually done with a tester and a developer or two testers, but the tester can pair with anyone they think would make a good partner such as customer support, product management, or even marketing.

While testers don’t usually want people peeking over their shoulder while they do their job, pair testing encourages two people to work together towards share objectives in testing.

The two will work at the same machine with one person controlling the test through the mouse and keyboard and one person giving feedback, asking questions, taking notes, and making observations. Both parties should be taking part in a collaborative discussion about the test scenario.

Pair testing is similar to the idea of pair programming where two developers work together, and one writes the code while the other reviews, ask questions, or makes suggestions. In pair testing, however, both participants are going through the functionality, usability, or visual representation of that code whether it be a new feature or a completely new UI.

In Lisa Crispin’s pair testing blog, she says her partner has likened pair testing to riding in the passenger seat versus driving the car — “You have so much more chance to look around.”

Basically, pair testing is just two people testing the same scenario together instead of one, using their unique skills to provide additional insight to the rest of their team.

Benefits of Pair Testing

  • Cross-Team Collaboration – By combining the unique skills of different team members, you can gain more insight into what is needed for the specific scenario to be successful. Pairing with a developer, for example, means less back and forth between both roles when new code needs to be tested. Working with another tester or a product manager would give another insight. Each of these roles can then work together to decide what is working well and what may need to be changed or fixed.
  • Two Perspectives – When testing, you’re always limited to the fact that not every user journey will be accounted for. The reality is, it’s impossible to think of every possible combination of actions that could be performed. But by having two participants think about a case, it means there’s another set of eyes and brains to consider new possibilities or strategies.
  • Breaking Down Silos – When things are moving fast in Agile development teams, testers can often end up in siloed roles — especially if they’re working on a small or single team. Pair testing helps break down barriers, work with new people, and get testers’ constructive feedback ideas out in the open so each role can better understand where the other fits in and how it leads to quality.
  • Exploratory Testing – Because of the nature of pair testing, it’s usually an exploratory effort. Where exploratory testing is so important for finding bugs and providing feedback on new features, it still doesn’t always get the dedication it deserves. Pair testing encourages teams to make more time for exploratory testing to collect and deliver that valuable feedback.
  • Having a Witness – Sometimes it can be hard to recreate bugs, and then when that happens, make a case that they need to be fixed. But the best way to solve any mystery case is with a witness. By having someone to see bugs as they come up and help determine whether or not it should be considered a bug in the first place, it is easier to pass to the development team with certainty for fixing.
  • Training Opportunity – Not only is pair testing a great way to help the team deliver with an extra measure quality, it’s also a good way for each participant to learn from each other. For newer testers, matching up with a mentor for pair testing is a fun and productive way to teach them what goes into a successful test session. For other roles that may be interested in testing more, this can teach them what to look at. No matter what level or expertise, there’s always something to be learned from your partner in pair testing.

How to do Pair Testing

Pair testing really isn’t that different from other methods of software testing, but there are a few things you may want to do in preparation.

Following these steps will ensure that it’ll be a productive use of both your time.

  1. Identify the test case you want to work on and why you think pair testing is a solution.
  2. Identify who you want to work with and what each person’s role will be. What do you hope to gain by working with this person specifically? Will one person be operating the machine the entire time or will you switch?
  3. Determine an objective from your pair testing session. Do you want to find bugs or suggest new features? Maybe you want to define tests that should be automated — maybe all of the above. Understand who you will be bringing your results to if it’s different than your normal report.
  4. Create a timeline that gives yourselves enough room to explore and meet these objectives while staying focused on the tasks at hand.
  5. Come up with a few specific cases you want to be included in the pair testing. Katrina Clokie suggests writing down a simple checklist of ideas.
  6. Speak your mind and ask questions. Mike Talks says that “pairing is an interactive partnership,” which means both parties are equally contributing thoughts, ideas, and suggestions regularly throughout the test.
  7. Be open to differences of opinion, styles, and techniques. While this can lead to conflicting points of view, it’s always important to respect the other person’s feedback and try to learn from it and accommodate it.
  8. Keep notes and documentation that you can use to share results with other stakeholders.

This, of course, is a very basic process for pair testing, but in real life, the test case, your partner, and objectives will all affect how you go about pair testing. These should give you a good foundation to get started and ask the right questions.

Two is Company

Pair testing is one kind of what Malcolm Isaacs calls “social software testing”. When following an agile methodology and shifting left, it’s crucial for testers, developers, product owners, and other participants in the SDLC to come together for collaboration. Pair testing is just way one to do this.

While it may not be as deeply technical as, say, test automation might be, there are clearly many advantages to having two team members get together to discuss the quality of the application under test — what’s working, what’s not, and what needs to change?

 

 

The Marketers’ Guide to Testing Your Website

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Marketer's guide to testing
Software testing has traditionally been the job of Quality Assurance teams, but as organizations realize the inherent value of a seamless online user experience, the idea of testing has also proven invaluable to other roles.

As marketing professionals evaluate the effectiveness of their strategies, tactics, and content, it’s no longer enough to blindly publish landing pages, design websites, and send emails.

By performing the following tests, marketers of all levels and ensure that the intent of their messaging matches the execution.

A/B Testing – Sometimes, it can seem like communicating with prospects can be a shot in the dark. A/B testing lets you test two scenarios at once to determine which your audience responds to better. The is often done with on web page or app to better understand how you’re communicating with your prospects. For example, if you were unsure what to write for the header on your website, you could A/B test two versions against each other to gain insights into what resonates best to capture leads and use that data choose A or B. In addition, analyzing the results of your test helps you make informed decisions that will convert leads in the future, such as the next time you have to write a page heading. Optimizely is the deluxe A/B testing tool, allowing you to go into your page and live edit through the dashboard to make tests. Optimizely keeps all your data organized, and includes value-add features such as retroactive filtering, intuitive stats engine, optimized targeting options, and saved audiences. For teams that are looking for something that will fill their more basic A/B testing needs, VWO is a comparable option.

Responsive Design Testing – Did you know that having a responsive website improves your SEO? We bet your ears just perked up. It’s true — Google prefers sites that are responsive. What does this mean for you? Basically, you need to make sure that your site works not only on desktop browsers but also on other screen sizes such as mobile and tablets. It’s not surprising the mobile use is increasing year after year, not to mention exceeding online desktop activity. While the thought of mobile-friendliness should be a no-brainer, it may not always fall on the marketer’s plate to design responsively. However, when it has a stake in your page ranking, it becomes a whole other story. Tools that provide a device lab and visual testing capabilities like CrossBrowserTesting can help give you a look at what your website looks like on those devices you don’t have access to. This is a fairly easy way to guarantee the compatibility of your site with the most popular search engine so you can make sure all that backlinking work you’ve been doing isn’t for nothing.

Email Testing – If you’re slaving over email marketing but keep seeing your open rates drop, it might not be that your copy is lacking as it is as much a lack of testing. Just like you need to make sure your website looks good on different devices, you also need to make sure your emails look good on different email servers. Unfortunately engaging email messaging isn’t always enough when Gmail and Outlook are displaying content differently — unless you stick to HTML. Litmus provides a platform that lets you build, edit, and preview your emails on over 90 different email clients (did you even know there were that many?) because the only thing worse than an email that goes out with a typo is an email that doesn’t show up at all at all. Speaking of errors, Litmus does a crawl of your email to make sure that links work, images render, and content loads so you can feel confident in every email you send out. By using a tool like Litmus, you can stop leaving your emails up to chance and spot discrepancies before you send them out to your 100,000 count subscriber list.

User Testing – What’s a better method to getting feedback on your digital experience than asking the very people whose opinions you care about most — your users? User testing is an unparalleled way to get feedback from real people on the usability of your application. When you have a website, for example, it can be difficult to put yourself in your users’ shoes and think about their needs outside of how you would want the application to look and work. User testing lets you gain insight into the user experience of someone who may not have been on your app before, and platforms like UserTesting provide you with videos of those real people giving their honest feedback on your website, mobile app, or another project of your choosing. By getting your product in front of your target audience, you can get more accurate insight into why your users perform certain actions or want things a certain way.

Performance Testing – Performance testing is fairly underrated in the marketing world, but it could be what makes or breaks the success of your application. Why spend all your time making the perfect graphics, designing the perfect layout, and writing the perfect copy if your website is going to take forever to load or crash when too many people visit? When 51 percent of online shoppers in the US say that site slowness is the top reason they’d abandon a purchase and a 2-second delay in load time during a transaction result in abandonment rates of up to 87 percent, according to Radware. It’s not just your QA team’s problem to test for performance. In fact, it’s in your best interest to see your marketing efforts succeed. Leveraging tools like LoadComplete and LoadUI will help you determine breakpoints in your application so you can get a better understanding of how fast it is and how much it can handle. Trust us — around the holidays, performance testing is a lifesaver.

Conclusion

Testing is all about checking the quality of your application, but it shouldn’t be limited to QA teams. With plenty of tools on the market, it’s becoming easier for marketers to conduct their own tests in order to optimize websites, landing pages, emails, and other content. By including testing in your marketing, you can know that your efforts are reaching a higher level of quality and trust that your messages are getting across to more users each time they interact with you online.

 

Join Us for a Ministry of Testing Meetup Featuring Angie Jones

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angie jones which tests should i automate ministry of testing smartbear
SmartBear and Angie Jones are joining forces to teach you everything you need to know about setting up an automation strategy for success in our upcoming Ministry of Testing meetup. Trust us — this is one you don’t want to miss.

Angie Jones is a Senior Automation Engineer at Twitter who is a guru of strategic test automation. She is continuously sharing her insights and experiences with the global testing community at conferences such as Romania Testing Days, StarEast, Selenium Conference, and of course Agile Testing Days USA, where she will be delivering a keynote prior to the meetup.

We are ecstatic to welcome her to the SmartBear headquarters to discuss “Which Tests Should I Automate”. As automation takes the spotlight for faster testing, it’s important for teams to realize that not every test should be automated. Angie will walk you through the process of deciding which test cases should be automated and which you should reconsider.

Additionally, Bria Grangard and Joan Liu of the CrossBrowserTesting team will be covering how you can approach issues of speed and scalability within your organization, arming you with a checklist of action items for supercharged test automation that you can implement right away.

If you’re in Boston, come by the SmartBear HQ in Assembly Row on June 26 to enjoy snacks, drinks, and mingling, while enjoying all three talented presenters live.

To register, visit the Ministry of Testing Boston meetup page.

If you can’t come in person, you can still tune in remote by streaming on Youtube Live. Save to your calendar now.

Selenium vs. Cypress: Is WebDriver on Its Way Out?

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selenium vs cypressThere’s a new kid on the block for open source test automation tools, and everyone’s talking about how Cypress may be an alternative to Selenium.

But while some have posed that Cypress signals the end of an era, we’re not so sure that Selenium is going anywhere anytime soon.

To better understand the similarities and differences between these two tools, let’s take a better look at what they both do.

Selenium

Selenium WebDriver is the open source automation tool we all know and love. With a history starting from the humble beginnings of IDE and transforming into Selenium 2.0 a.k.a. Selenium WebDriver, Selenium has become a foundation of many modern software teams’ test automation toolkits.

Most are familiar with Selenium’s use — it makes direct calls to the browser using each browser’s native support for automation. By writing a script in Selenese using the compatible programming languages, you can run tests that work as if you were driving the browser yourself.

While the learning curve can be step for Selenium and requires the knowledge of at least one programming language, it has a vast community of active users and even boasts an annual user conference.

One of the foundations of Selenium is the ability to test on the most popular browsers, making it essential to cross-browser testing.

As testing with Selenium has grown in popularity, it’s not only become a basis of many automation strategies but has also become an integral part of many third-party tools such as CrossBrowserTesting. Once you know how to use Selenium, you can use these cloud testing tools to access thousands of browsers and leverage parallel testing to cut down on testing time.

Cypress

So how is Cypress different from Selenium, and how is it the same?

First, Cypress is said to have an easier onboarding than Selenium, where all you need to do is install the .exe to get up and running sine all the drivers and dependencies are automatically installed. With Selenium, on the other hand, you need to spend a little more time getting everything up and running.

One of the advantages of Selenium is that it supports most of the major programming languages including Java, Perl PHP, Python, Ruby, and C#, so if your team is already using one of those languages, Cypress may not be ideal since it only supports JavaScript.

In addition, since Cypress tests are written using Mocha and Chai, the syntax echoes what most Javascript users understand. This means that if you work with Javascript, it will be especially easy to start using Cypress. However, if you’re more familiar with another language, it will be fairly complex.

Cypress almost acts as a “freemium” model. Similiar to Selenium which is entirely open sourced unless you integrate with a paid tool, you can also add to Cypress’s core capabilities by leveraging the paid dashboard which includes a test runner that allows you to easily debug tests with DOM snapshots and includes video storage for private projects.

Selenium and Cypress differ in the way of their architecture, as well. Selenium is made up of bindings, or libraries, and the WebDriver, which controls the browsers. These two components work through the JSON network.

Alternatively, while Cypress is used for UI testing, it uses its own unique DOM manipulation and runs directly in the browser with no network communication. Cypress is often cited as a developer-friendly test automation tool for this reason since this often causes frustrations for them in Selenium.

Having a different architecture on top of an Electron app also allows Cypress to be so close to the web application under test that we can do things that you can’t do in Selenium such as stubbing DOM APIs.

One of the biggest gaps between Selenium and Cypress is that while Selenium runs against different browsers, as mentioned before, Cypress only supports Chrome. Selenium’s browser support is often integral to those who use it, making Cypress severely lacking in the area of cross-browser testing.

For software teams that find importance in checking their website on multiple browsers instead of just leaving their code up to chance, finding their way around this deficiency could prove challenging to Cypress users.

Cypress vs Selenium

Cypress and Selenium serve a similar purpose that is achieved in two different ways.

Selenium is a library but requires a unit testing framework or a runner plus an assertions library to build out its capabilities. Cypress provides a robust, complete framework for running automated tests but takes some of the freedom out of Selenium by confining the user to specific frameworks and languages.

If you don’t know what you’re doing when it comes to building out a test automation framework, Cypress may be a good option.

Another thing to keep in mind is that if you look at how Cypress is built, it is largely a unit testing tool that is will fit best in Javascript-focused development teams. Once you stray from these details and your team decides to experiment with other methods of test automation, you’ll find that Selenium can better accommodate those growing pains.

As a tool made by developers for developers, it’s less a replacement for Selenium and more so a way to introduce developers to test automation.

Like most instances when it comes to test automation, the tool you pick and the method you follow will largely depend on what your team decides and what works best for your organization. However, the notion that Selenium is on its last legs is misled.

If you’re still confused as to the differences between Cypress and Selenium, Automation Rhapsody provides a really great breakdown of how each performs in different categories.

WWDC 2018: Everything You Missed

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Compared to Apple’s normal annual developer conference, Monday’s keynote was fairly low-key (especially amidst news of Microsoft acquiring GitHub). However, “small” changes for Apple are hardly underwhelming.

Don’t expect to hear about a new iPhone coming out — we’re hoping to hear about that later in the year. As usual, there were few hardware updates this week, with most of the announcements revolving around Apple software including iOS and MacOS.

In case you missed it, here are some of the highlights from WWDC 2018.

iOS 12

With the new features proposed in iOS 12, Apple has taken measures to reduce our phone addiction tendencies rather than encourage them.

Some of these features include an updated Do Not Disturb in addition to a Screentime app that gives you weekly reports of your usage — imagine your the “Health” app, but for time spent on your phone and in different apps.

If you do notice that the amount of time you scroll through social exceeds what one would deem as “healthy” usage, you will have the ability to set limits.

Parents will also be able to take advantage of iOS 12’s focus on cutting down screen time as well by getting reports on their children’s usage and having the ability to set allowances.

This seems to follow closely behind what we heard from Google I/O with similar updates to the Android OS that are trying to get users to stare at their screens less.

But why are companies like Google and Apple suddenly starting to care about our addiction when we’ve had our phones glued to our hands since the late 2000’s?

It could have to do with backlash from investors and research on increasingly early phone dependencies among children. It seems these two tech giants are hoping that by focusing on social responsibility and supporting the movement to use their phones less, blue screen addicts and parents will be more likely to buy them in the first place knowing that they can control their digital temptations.

If you’re perfectly content with your digital lifestyle, what else is there to look forward to the next time you update your iPhone?

iOS 12 will come with a new virtual tape measure app that uses augmented reality to calculate the dimensions of real objects. This is part of a larger shift towards AI-powered technology, and the tape measure is just one of the new ARKit2 features in iOS 12.

Apple is going up against the Galaxy S9’s AR Emoji attempt with Memoji, which uses your front-facing camera to make an Animoji (animated emoji) of your own face. And if something’s a little off, there are customization options to ensure that you have a say in skin tone, hairstyles, facial features, etc.

Siri another gets an upgrade because the only thing better than a personal assistant is one that already knows your coffee order without having to tell them. With the new Shortcuts app, Apple is trying to stay a few steps ahead of you and predict the information and services you’ll need throughout the day. Siri will use machine learning to identify repeat behavior, then offer actions to help you out. So, yes, telling her to place an order through the Starbucks app should place your usual order without having to explicitly say so.

Lastly, Facetime is finally realizing that some people have more than one best friend. In fact, if you have up to 32 best friends you’ll all be able to hop on video chat together with the next iOS update.

MacOS Mojave (10.14)

Following High Sierra, Apple is making plans for the release of the newest Mac operating system, Mojave. While there are no groundbreaking updates to Mojave, there are a few noticeable differences:

  • Dark Mode will allow you to switch your desktop to a dark color scheme, affecting apps as well.
  • If you find your chaotic desktop is stressing you out, Desktop stacks will group related icons together.
  • Even your wallpaper is getting an upgrade with Dynamic Desktop that changes select Apple-designed desert-themed backgrounds over the course of the day based on what time it is.
  • The Mac App Store is getting a redesign to help users navigate more easily.

And, no, Apple doesn’t plan to merge iPhone and Mac operating systems any time soon. But the company has been looking at ways to bring iOS apps to Mac computers. For example, Mojave will include News, Stocks, and Voice Memos apps.

watchOS 5

With the newly released Apple Watch 3, Apple is continuing to build out the operating system to support wellness.

With watchOS 5, you can expect to track your heart rate, track your pace when running, and even track your altitude, giving you much more insight into those weekend hiking trips. watchOS will also be smarter and know when you’ve started your workout without having to tell it.

And speaking to the hearts of true outdoorsmen, watchOS 5 will have walkie-talkie capabilities between other Apple Watches allowing you to buzz in over Wi-Fi or cellular data. We imagine this will be one of those features you never knew how much you wanted until you have it at your disposal.

A few other cool things with watchOS 5? You now have the ability to download and listen to podcasts, and you can challenge your friends to more competitions.

Not to mention, you can finally access web content on your Apple Watch. What does this mean for the future of responsive design? Looks like you might have to add another screen size to your testing arsenal soon. One thing’s for sure — developers are already discussing what this means for them as they continue to build sites that support a variety of devices.

 

The Developer Community’s Response to Microsoft Acquiring GitHub

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microsoft acquires github
On Monday, Microsoft announced its acquisition of GitHub in a $7.5 billion deal.

Since GitHub’s platform serves over 28 million developers and hosts around 85 million projects in an effort to create a community of collaboration and learning, this news is near and dear to our hearts at SmartBear.

Where SmartBear serves a hefty 6.5 million software professional in over 22,000 companies, many of our users are familiar with GitHub and regularly use it as a code repository. As the heart of the open source community, freelance developers and tech giants alike (Amazon, Google, and Apple come to mind) use GitHub for projects small and large.

So why Microsoft’s interest in GitHub in the first place? Microsoft is the top contributor to GitHub with roughly 1,300 employees pushing code. After recently shutting down its own version of GitHub, CodePlex, Microsoft mentioned that they had already moved most of their projects to GitHub, noting “GitHub is the de facto place for open source sharing and most open source projects have migrated there.”

For this reason, the acquisition isn’t totally surprising, and to many speculators, seemed like the logical next-step with Monday confirming rumors.

Upon hearing of Microsoft’s acquisition, we’ve noticed mixed reactions. Looking quickly at the poll on SmartBear’s Twitter, you can see the vote is split.

The majority of respondents at 38 percent take a neutral stance and don’t think much will change. Meanwhile, people are weighing in on each end of the spectrum with 34 percent foreseeing positive change and 28 percent feeling uncertain towards GitHub’s future.

Those that are faithful in Microsoft are hoping that it could provide the stability GitHub has been needing in recently turbulent times. Additionally, there is excitement around the ways that Microsoft will be able to elevate GitHub’s current capabilities by making it easier to develop in the Azure cloud, expanding the GitHub Marketplace, and integrating VS Code with GitHub support, for example.

Where does the skepticism come in? Some are afraid that GitHub could go the ways of Skype after Microsoft’s acquisition of it in 2011. After Microsoft made software updates to the popular video calling platform and refocused it for enterprise consumers and corporate markets, loyal Skype users began taking to the internet to complain, saying bugs in the UI had made Skype too difficult to use and it did not resemble the software they once loved.

Additionally, not all developers trust Microsoft to be the open source ally it claims to be. Some fear that keeping their projects on GitLab could take a turn for the worse if Microsoft were to use their powers for evil and dig into competitors’ private repositories or take advantage of data mining.

A percentage of users have taken on such a strong stance against the acquisition that they are already flocking to rivals such as GitLab, possibly influenced by the #movingtogitlab hashtag and discounted packages.

One thing’s for certain, Microsoft has done a lot for the open source community, which is something devs can get behind. Supporters of the acquisition point out that Microsoft isn’t the same company it was a few years ago since CEO Satya Nadella came on in 2014.

Pursuing open source technologies such as PowerShell and Visual Studio Code, Microsoft has made notable contributions to the open source community in recent years thanks to Nadella. Additionally, by making the move to support more open source ventures such as embracing Linux, Microsoft has separated itself from its anti-OSS reputation in order to offer products and services that work on a variety of platforms developers are using.

It’s apparent with the acquisition of GitHub that Microsoft hopes to continue making a name for themselves in this space, and the company has promised to keep GitHub independent and open.

This is something that we’re passionate about at SmartBear as we strive to support the open source community, and many of our tools are either open source or integrate with open source projects.

While Microsoft makes a valiant effort to play a critical role in the open source community, it seems that our best option is to get behind them until they give us a reason not to.

Webinar: Meet the QA Team Behind America’s Test Kitchen

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America’s Test Kitchen is all about perfecting the recipe for success, literally.

With two TV shows, three print magazine, and four different websites, they’ve built a customer base that is hungry for quality culinary content. But their users are also paying close attention to how they’re being served their online experiences and want to consume it in a way that works best for their lifestyle.

This means the QA team is under a microscope when it comes to releasing a Michelin star web application that works across a large selection of devices and browsers. Whether users are taking a cooking course, shopping for kitchenware, or watching one of the pros whip up a delicious dinner, America’s Test Kitchen strives to satisfy from the backend to the front of the house.

Join CrossBrowserTesting and America’s Test Kitchen QA Manager Megan Collins & QA Engineer Michael Ng as we go behind the counter to learn about what kind of testing is needed to keep up with a company that aims empower and impress millions of home cooks.

In this webinar, you’ll get a taste of:

  • What the America’s Test Kitchen QA strategy looks like
  • The incredible growth of the testing team and their shift to automation
  • How they use CrossBrowserTesting to serve up their cross-compatible web app on a silver platter

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6 Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Decide What Test Cases to Automate

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Even just the idea of agile test automation is enough to get the attention of most software teams. But while the idea of faster testing may seem like the silver bullet, there’s a time and place for automation.

Before you jump in head first, you should evaluate how automation is actually fitting into your organization. By asking these questions, you can get a better idea as to whether automation is the right move, or if you should take another route.

  1. What’s the risk involved? If you’ve performed a risk analysis of your application, you probably have a good idea of which test cases are the most important to check in each code change and which are a lower priority. Consider how human error could affect test data if it’s not automated. Think about how different test cases that may critically impact the customer and/or impact internal team downtime if broken. Additionally, you might want to automate high traffic page, features that depend on security, and problematic areas and other functions that rank high on your risk analysis.
  2. How often am I going to run this test again in the future? Running the same test more than once may seem repetitive and tedious, but if you’re not actually going to be running it frequently, it might not be worth it to automate. For example, if you know you’re going to have to test a feature two or three times but won’t be keeping it as a permanent part of the application or won’t be testing it after that, you might want to rethink automation. The tests you decide to automate should be a foundation of your regression testing strategy, so if you don’t feel like they’re a critical part of the application to be checked in every code change, it may be best to keep them separate.
  3. How much time am I willing to invest? When automation requires so much time and maintenance, you have to determine the ROI of your efforts. Some regression tests may seem like they’re a candidate for automation but upon closer inspection, might not be worth the energy for the value they’re providing. Automation is not a quick, one-and-done solution to your problems. Take a lesson from Elon Musk — you don’t want to drop automation into the mix without a second thought. Spend the time making sure your first test is checking all the boxes and meeting requirements. Then determine how often it will need to be updated or reevaluated in order to establish whether or not automation is worth your time investment.
  4. Are there parts of this test case that still need to be explored? You might think that you’re ready to automate, but keep in mind that automation comes after a thorough exploratory testing session. Just because you can automate doesn’t mean you should, and many tests are better off being performed manually. Are there still instances that could benefit from human observation? While you can’t expect to manually cover every part of the application, getting a foundation during exploratory testing is what leads to more successful, stable, and insightful automated tests.
  5. Does automating support the needs of my team? If you’re automating a test case, you want to make sure the tests you write are going to actually answer the questions your team is asking. First, take a hint from Bas Dijkstra, and discuss the “why” before firing up a test automation tool. While Selenium is a great tool for automation, understanding the nuances of the many commands and abilities of it can take some getting used to, so if you’re not able to write a script that encompasses all of the requirements your team is requesting, another method of testing may be better. If you still feel that automation is the best process for the job but don’t feel confident in your Selenium skills, a tool like Record & Replay may help you achieve your testing goals. There are many choices when it comes to automated testing tools, so you need to make sure the one your organization uses will support the testing you’re trying to accomplish.
  6. Why are you automating? Sometimes the most simple questions can give you the most telling answers. If you’re automating because you think it’s what you should be doing or because your boss is telling you to, you might not be automating your tests for the right reasons. Your objective with test automation should be to provide insight to you your team and give faster feedback. If you have ulterior motives, your efforts won’t take you very far.

Conclusion

Even if you could automate every test, you would quickly find it’s not helping you or the rest of your team very much. Next time you’re deciding on whether or not to automate, ask the right questions first.

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