This capability integrates into mabl’s SaaS platform so that users can enhance the value of existing functional tests, move performance testing to an earlier phase of the development lifecycle, and cut down on infrastructure and operations costs.

“The primary goal is to help customers test application changes under production load before they release them so that they can detect any new bottlenecks or things that they would have experienced as the changes hit production before release,” said Dan Belcher, co-founder of mabl.

According to the company, these API load testing capabilities allow for the unification of functional and non-functional testing by utilizing functional API tests for performance and importing Postman Collections to cut down on the time it takes to create tests. 

Mabl also stated that this performance testing lowers the barrier to a sustainable and collaborative performance testing practice, even for teams that do not have dedicated performance testers or specific performance testing tools. 

“Anyone within the software team can use it, so it is not limited to just the software developers or just the performance experts,” Belcher said. “Because we’re low-code and already handling the functional testing, it makes it super easy for the teams to be able to define and execute performance tests on their own without required specialized skills.”

Furthermore, these tests can also be configured to run alongside functional tests on demand, on a schedule, or as a part of CI/CD pipelines. 

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FEATURED PROVIDERS

mabl is the enterprise SaaS leader of intelligent, low-code test automation that empowers high-velocity software teams to embed automated end-to-end tests into the entire development lifecycle. Customer-centric brands rely on mabl’s unified platform for creating, managing, and running automated tests that result in faster delivery of high-quality, business critical applications. Learn more at https://www.mabl.com; follow @mablhq on Twitter and @mabl on LinkedIn.

Parasoft helps organizations continuously deliver quality software with its market-proven automated software testing solutions. Parasoft’s AI-enhanced technologies reduce the time, effort, and cost of delivering secure, reliable, compliant software with everything from deep code analysis and unit testing to web UI and API testing, plus service virtualization and merged code coverage. Bringing all this together, Parasoft’s award-winning reporting and analytics dashboard delivers a centralized view of application quality, enabling organizations to deliver with confidence.

testRigor helps organizations dramatically reduce time spent on test maintenance, improve test stability, and dramatically improve the speed of test creation. This is achieved through its support of “plain English” language that allows users to describe how to find elements on the screen and what to do with those elements from the end-user’s perspective. People creating tests on their system build 2,000+ tests per year per person. On top of it,  testRigor helps teams deploy their analytics library in production that will make systems automatically produce tests reflecting the most frequently used end-to-end flows from production.

OTHER PROVIDERS

Applitools is built to test all the elements that appear on a screen with just one line of code. Using Visual AI, you can automatically verify that your web or mobile app functions and appears correctly across all devices, all browsers and all screen sizes. It is designed to integrate with your existing tests. We support all major test automation frameworks and programming languages covering web, mobile, and desktop apps.

Appvance IQ can generate its own tests, surfacing critical bugs in minutes with limited human involvement in web and mobile applications. AIQ empowers enterprises to improve the quality, performance and security of their most critical applications, while transforming the efficiency and output of their testing teams and lowering QA costs.

Digital.ai Continuous Testing enables organizations to reduce risk and provide their customers satisfying, error-free experiences — across all devices and browsers. Digital.ai Continuous Testing provides expansive test coverage across 2000+ real mobile devices and web browsers, and seamlessly integrates with best-in-class tools throughout the DevOps/DevSecOps pipeline.

HCL Software develops, markets, sells, and supports over 20 product families with particular focus on Customer Experience, Digital Solutions, Secure DevOps, and Security & Automation. Its mission is to drive ultimate customer success of their IT investments through relentless innovation of our software products. 

HPE Software’s automated testing solutions simplify software testing within fast-moving agile teams and for continuous integration scenarios. Integrated with DevOps tools and ALM solutions, HPE automated testing solutions keep quality at the center of today’s modern applications and hybrid infrastructures. 

IBM: Quality is essential and the combination of automated testing and service virtualization from IBM Rational Test Workbench allows teams to assess their software throughout their delivery life cycle. IBM has a market leading solution for the continuous testing of end-to-end scenarios covering mobile, cloud, cognitive, mainframe and more. 

Keysight Technologies Digital Automation Intelligence (DAI) platform is the first AI-driven test automation solution with unique capabilities that make the testing process faster and easier. With DAI, you can automate 95% of activities, including test-case design, test execution, and results analysis. This enables teams to rapidly accelerate testing, improve the quality of software and integrate with DevOps at speed. The intelligent automation reduces time to market and ensures a consistent experience across all devices.

Micro Focus enables customers to accelerate test automation with one intelligent functional testing tool for web, mobile, API and enterprise apps. Users can test both the front-end functionality and back-end service parts of an application to increase test coverage across the UI and API.

Microsoft’s Visual Studio helps developers create, manage, and run unit tests by offering the Microsoft unit test framework or one of several third-party and open-source frameworks. The company provides a specialized tool set for testers that delivers an integrated experience starting from Agile planning to test and release management, on-premises or in the cloud. 

Kobiton offers its patented GigaFox on-premises or hosted, and solves mobile device sharing and management challenges during development, debugging, manual testing, and automated testing. A pre-installed and pre-configured Appium server provides “instant on” Appium test automation.

NowSecure identifies the broadest array of security threats, compliance gaps and privacy issues in custom-developed, commercial, and business-critical mobile apps. NowSecure customers can choose automated software on-premises or in the cloud, expert professional penetration testing and managed services, or a combination of all as needed. 

Orasi is a leading provider of software testing services, utilizing test management, test automation, enterprise testing, Continuous Delivery, monitoring, and mobile testing technology. 

Perfecto users can pair their favorite frameworks with Perfecto to automate advanced testing capabilities, like GPS, device conditions, audio injection, and more. It also includes full integration into the CI/CD pipeline, continuous testing improves efficiencies across all of DevOps.  

ProdPerfect is an autonomous, end-to-end (E2E) regression testing solution that continuously identifies, builds and evolves E2E test suites via data-driven, machine-led analysis of live user behavior data. It addresses critical test coverage gaps, eliminates long test suite runtimes and costly bugs in production, and removes the QA burden that consumes massive engineering resources.  

Progress Software’s Telerik Test Studio is a test automation solution that helps teams be more efficient in functional, performance and load testing, improving test coverage and reducing the number of bugs that slip into production. 

Sauce Labs provides a cloud-based platform for automated testing of web and mobile applications. Optimized for use in CI and CD environment, and built with an emphasis on security, reliability and scalability, users can run tests written in any language or framework using Selenium or Appium.

SmartBear tools are built to streamline your process while seamlessly working with your existing products. Whether it’s TestComplete, Swagger, Cucumber, ReadyAPI, Zephyr, or one of our other tools, we span test automation, API life cycle, collaboration, performance testing, test management, and more. 

Synopsys offers a powerful and highly configurable test automation flow that provides seamless integration of all Synopsys TestMAX capabilities. Early validation of complex DFT logic is supported through full RTL integration while maintaining physical, timing and power awareness through direct links into the Synopsys Fusion Design Platform.

SOASTA’s Digital Performance Management (DPM) Platform includes five technologies: TouchTest mobile functional test automation; mPulse real user monitoring (RUM); the CloudTest platform for continuous load testing; Digital Operation Center (DOC) for a unified view of contextual intelligence accessible from any device; and Data Science Workbench, simplifying analysis of current and historical web and mobile user performance data. 

Tricentis Tosca, the #1 continuous test automation platform, accelerates testing with a script-less, AI-based, no-code approach for end-to-end test automation. With support for over 160+ technologies and enterprise applications, Tosca provides resilient test automation for any use case. 

To read the full Buyers Guide, click here. To see how companies are helping with automated testing initiatives, click here.

The post A guide to automated testing tools appeared first on SD Times.

Darrel Farris, manager of solutions engineering at mabl

Software development teams are realizing that automated testing is key to accelerating product velocity and reaching the full potential of DevOps. When fully integrated into a company’s development pipeline, testing becomes an early alert system for short-term defects as well as long-term performance issues. The key to realizing this potential: simple test creation and rich reporting features. 

Mabl is low-code, intelligent test software that allows everyone to create automated tests covering web UIs, APIs, and mobile browsers with 80% less effort. Quality teams can extend the value of end-to-end tests even further with automated accessibility checks that help ensure every user has a delightful experience, regardless of access needs. Machine learning and AI features like auto-healing and Intelligent Wait help teams create more reliable tests and reduce test maintenance. Results from every test are tracked within mabl’s comprehensive suite of reporting features, making it easy to understand product quality trends. With test creation simplified and quality data at their fingertips, everyone can focus on resolving defects quickly and improving product quality. 

Mabl also includes native integrations with tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Jira, so that testing information can be seamlessly integrated into workflows and everyone can benefit from mabl’s rich diagnostic data. Teams can monitor performance with speed indexes for all web pages, and manage API quality with data on the response time for each API endpoint. This allows teams to shift from reacting to failed tests and customer complaints to proactively managing product quality, improving the customer experience.

Arthur Hicken, chief evangelist at Parasoft

At Parasoft, we have various AI components and capabilities that augment the testers’ work at every layer of the testing pyramid. 

Our AI improves the static analysis experience with fewer false positives, better prioritization and understanding of risk models, and it has the necessary standards such as ISO 26262, PCI-DSS, OWASP, and CWE for compliance in certain industries. 

On top of that, we have advanced test creation with the generation of mocks and stubs to follow the best practices of unit testing in isolation and we have the tools that can help you determine how you can expand a test to provide additional code coverage. 

Test impact analysis helps you understand what tests you need to run when there are changes in code, tests, or requirements. 

We also have AI for API testing to record manual tester behavior and automatically convert that into API tests that are highly maintainable and execute quickly. We can apply AI to create test assets that not only perform functional testing, but you can automatically apply additional testing like security tests, or load and performance tests.

Further, we can use AI to capture a manual test and use it to create a test that can be run automatically because it can be automated and integrated in regression, have AI-based self-healing capabilities and perform security tests without additional tester effort or special training.

Parasoft’s solution can perform deep code analysis, which provides users with the ability to find structural problems. It also helps in functional testing, whether API testing, UI testing, or automated testing. We have a unique position in testing because our solutions cover both a white-box view at the code level as well as a black-box view at the functional and application level. Because we have both views, it enables us to make inferences that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. So, we can start to correlate literally what’s going on at the code analysis level and the unit and functional test level with what the external tests are doing and use this to provide better advice on where a problem exists in the code and how to repair it.

Parasoft’s capability of using AI to automate testing and having a full understanding from deep code analysis all the way through the external testing lets us provide a better experience to the end user. 

Artem Golubev, CEO at testRigor

testRigor empowers manual testers to build functional end-to-end test automation at any degree of complexity, without the need for engineering knowledge in the mix. If a user can express manual test case steps in English, they’ll be able to build tests on the platform. testRigor will then execute the test for you from a human’s standpoint, interacting with a web, native, or mobile application. 

Any person, including those that don’t necessarily have coding skills, will be able to edit, maintain, upgrade, in addition to creating those tests. Also, our tests were measured to be 200 times more stable than Selenium tests, and our customers are typically spending 95% less time managing these tests. 

The QA teams can then be freed from click-through manual regression testing and maintaining automated scripts because the issue of maintenance with testRigor is eliminated for good. 

Just ask Keith Powe, VP of Engineering at IDT Corporation. His team could automate only four test cases a week per person, but with testRigor, they have increased their testing coverage from less than 34% to more than 91% in under 9 months. Spending a maximum of 0.1% of the time in test maintenance, IDT has a 90% reduction in bugs and a more effective CI/CD. Many other companies such as Upgrade, DataHerald, and others have cited drastic improvements in their testing strategy with the benefits that testRigor offers. 

Be sure to visit our site https://testrigor.com/ to learn more about how testRigor can help solve the biggest challenges that you’re facing with automated testing today.

To read the full Buyers Guide, click here. To see the guide to automated testing tools, click here.

The post How these companies can help with your automated testing initiatives appeared first on SD Times.

However, while test automation coverage saw a notable dip during the pandemic, it has since rebounded last year, according to SmartBear’s State of Quality Testing 2022 report. 

Last year saw the amount of companies performing just manual tests at 11%, while that number dwindled to 7% this year, almost returning to pre-pandemic levels of 5% of all tests being performed completely manually. 

When looking at the different types of tests and how they are performed, over half of respondents reported using manual testing for usability and user acceptance tests.

Unit tests, performance tests, and BDD framework tests were highest among all automated testing. 

This year, the most time-consuming activity was performing manual and exploratory tests, jumping to 26% from 18% last year as the most time-consuming task. In the same time period, learning how to use test tools as the most time-consuming challenge with testing fell from 22% to just 8%.

In the Agile and DevOps realm, there are higher levels of automation versus those companies that are still in the waterfall stages, according to Diego Lo Giudice, VP, principal analyst at Forrester. This is inherent to DevOps because if most of the testing is manual, it’s just going to slow down the rest of the team. 

“With DevOps and all the automation going on around it, testing needs to be very high, it needs to be above 80%. You kind of see that only for a few companies or specific projects inside an organization, but if you look at the rest of the market, probably it’s less than 30%,” Lo Giudice said. “I would say we’ve made some progress, but there’s more automation that’s needed.”

In fact, some of the companies that are adopting agile or DevOps methods find that testing sometimes becomes the bottleneck to rapid delivery, according to Darrel Farris, manager of solutions engineering at mabl. Testing in DevOps must be integrated into the pipeline so developers aren’t throwing code over to QA that hasn’t been tested – especially if teams are deploying multiple times per week or month.

Some of the big challenges to implementing automated testing are that there’s a lack of skills and because test automation requires change within the organization. 

“So there are a number of changes regarding people, processes, and technology, it’s not just getting a tool. And automating tests, this is about organizing, testing completely in a different way,” Lo Giudice added. 

Challenges with getting automated testing just right 

“One of the challenges we see from people is that they’re fundamentally approaching this wrong. We’ve had some of our customers talk about this, how they had to change the way they were thinking and so that the kind of common obvious symptom that you see about this today is people saying ‘we had a whole bunch of manual testers and so we’ll build a whole strategy on recording what they do and playing it back and building from there. And this is just fundamentally the wrong approach,” said Arthur Hicken, chief evangelist at Parasoft. 

Another challenge is that automated tests can become incredibly time-consuming to maintain due to the sheer number of tests that are generated. 

“The largest issue is that once a person builds 300 tests, it becomes a full-time job to maintain those tests and you hit the ceiling,” Artem Golubev, CEO at testRigor said. “Coupled with the fact that budgets are limited, people just can’t build more automations.” 

Golubev added that this difficulty to maintain all automated tests is the main reason why the majority of tests are still executed manually today. Automating tests can also be futile if it’s focused on the wrong areas. 

“QA teams are spending 80% of their weeks maintaining scripts due to rapidly changing UIs, instead of focusing on growing functional test coverage or expanding the types of testing they are doing on their application, such as accessibility or performance testing,” mabl’s Farris said. 

“I believe the testing pyramid is built on false assumptions that have never been correct in the first place,” Golubev said. “In a perfect vacuum, of course this is how things work and there are maybe one or two companies which have done it that way. In a real scenario, it’s always been more of an hourglass shape of testing.” 

He explained that this is because engineers who mostly write unit tests are very unlikely to contribute to end-to-end tests, very few engineers would write integration tests since they are such a pain to maintain, and there would be a lot of end-to-end tests where you have people working on them full-time. 

While the integration test value is to make sure that the system integrates properly, it doesn’t matter if you enter and the system doesn’t work properly, Golubev continued. End-to-end tests are actually the ones covering integration because those tests are the test which will prove that your system is usable by your end users.

“Let’s say you’re logging into a banking application and they can’t transfer money from account A to account B, then it does not matter. Even if all your integration tests are green and all your unit tests pass through it, it’s completely useless,” Golubev said. “So the most important tests are end-to-end tests, only then can that system function as intended. And therefore end-to-end tests should be the bulk of the tests that are done.”

The best way to then optimize end-to-end tests to make them run faster is to prioritize because end-to-end tests will inherently be much slower than unit tests. 

“With every type of testing in the organization, people need to assess whether they need to really leverage automation? Is it worth it? Is it something that will be repeated over and over that changes continuously? If you have to run a test, the same test more than three, four times you start asking yourself, well, maybe I should automate this,” Forrester’s Lo Giudice said. “So I don’t think 100% is what customers will achieve and will keep it more towards 80% as I said.”

One of the most efficient ways to make sure that all testing resources are aligned correctly is to align as a team on a testing strategy by starting with the most critical test cases that will ensure a high quality application experience for users, according to mabl’s Farris. This can be done by taking on a few test cases at first, then layering in additional test cases over time.

One way to do this is to create a quality center of excellence or a “quality champion” in an organization. This person or group is a testing expert who can advise and coach everyone from developers to product owners on testing best practices, Farris explained. Some of the manual testing is changing too because of the increasing use of exploratory testing, Lo Giudice explained. This type of manual testing is where the tester sits down with the developer and they work out the issues together. The tester puts the application through certain scenarios, the developer sees the problems and tries to fix them, and they take about two hours a day like that. 

The structure around automated testing is shifting

Both companies’ attitudes towards testing and who gets involved have shifted. As testing becomes more federated, you no longer have a centralized team that does all the testing as an afterthought, according to Lo Giudice. 

Now, there are testers that are moving into the development teams and the product teams to get all of the testing done together. And so what remains in the central team is specialized testing resources that maybe choose the tools that define what the new practices would look like, whether that’s shifting testing to the left or suggesting test-driven development or behavior-driven development. 

The test center is now much smaller working in consulting with the teams but testers move into the team itself, Lo Giudice explained. 

“So the typical manual tester that used to put a test case in an Excel sheet and run it through the application looking at what the test case told him to do suddenly now finds himself with a tool that is quite technical where he needs to write code to automate what he was doing manually,” Lo Giudice said. To solve this, there’s a trend among vendors to raise the level of abstraction of the tools so that a manual tester or even a person on the business side can test using a low code testing tool. 

Then come the technologies, platforms, and tools because after all, an organization needs testing tools that are integrated into CI/CD pipelines with the rest of the development and delivery tools that integrate with CI servers effectively on the cloud. 

“The point really is that testing takes a village and it takes all these different personas in an organization: business tester, and a subject matter expert in testing who is technical but not a coder, and developers that also may be doing API testing, lower level infrastructure testing within their IDE at a very technical level,” Lo Giudice said. 

According to testRigor’s Golubev, the directors of QA will benefit the most from automated testing since they’ll be able to cover far more functionality faster than they ever could before. However, engineers, manual testers, and product management will also be able to benefit from automated testing tooling since they’ll be able to collaborate together on the same tool. 

Previously, it was companies in the banking and health sectors that have been getting automated testing right but now it’s organizations like Lenovo or Volkswagen that have these 

highly complex software test, build, and deploy systems that are the envy of anybody, Parasoft’s Hicken said. Ultimately, it’s one of the things companies are going to do because that is what they’re competitors are moving toward.

AI helps with various levels of testing 

When you send data of all the tests that passed: the log files, the bugs and feed them to AI it can start telling you what you need to test and how when there’s a change coming. It also helps to tell whether to run all of the tests or just to select the few ones that will be impacted by the change. 

There have been impressive improvements in the vision and computer vision space to enable visual testing, Lo Giudice said. There’s a tool out there that sees what the human eye does when looking at the application and will notice things that are going wrong. It can also do it on types of applications that move very fast that the human eye can’t capture. 

One can also teach AI to not fail tests in certain scenarios to help with self-healing. For example, tests can sometimes fail simply because an object moved on the screen differently on the same application on a browser, and then on a mobile device because the layout might change and it’s not necessarily a bug. And so one can now teach the algorithm to not fail the test even though it’s not in the same position because it can find the locator of that object in some other place, Lo Giudice explained. 

There are also AI models that help minimize tests to solve the maintenance problem.

“This is the idea of the AI guiding a person to create tests that are more stable. The Holy Grail is that you create a set of tests that maximize coverage, but minimize the number of tests so that you have less to maintain, and that they’re not brittle,” Hicken said. “You want tests that have proper levels of abstraction, so that you aren’t spending more on keeping them alive than you were in creating them in the first place.”

Also with error clustering, AI can help find and classify bugs in a way that a tester can quickly recognize the bug and can suggest the right developer to fix the bug to reduce mean time to repair. It can use data from production to find out what are the most frequently used features within that application. There’s even a tool that generates unit tests as you code, which Forrester refers to as the tester Turing bot. 

“AI can also support the execution of more stable tests. For example, tests running in the cloud can execute almost too fast, before your application is in a loaded state,” mabl’s Farris said. “It applies intelligence that can slow down or speed up the execution of your tests by automatically adjusting wait times.”

“So AI is infusing along the entire software development lifecycle. And testing is one of the stages where it’s actually more mature than any other stage of the development lifecycle,” Forrester’s Lo Giudice said. 

To read how providers are helping with automated testing initiatives, click here. To read the guide to automated testing tools, click here.

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Many companies focus on quickly launching features to attract new customers, but it’s product quality that has the greatest impact on the customer experience. That’s because delivering features too fast without adequate testing introduces bugs, leading to a frustrating customer experience.

The question is: how can your organization balance innovation and quality to keep existing customers happy? DevOps and quality engineering allow development teams to introduce new features faster with much more confidence. This is the key to improving customer happiness, and in turn, increasing business resilience in the long run.

The Impact of User Experience on Customer Retention

Companies spend enormous amounts of resources on building a brand that attracts new customers, but a poor user experience can destroy any loyalty in a matter of minutes. In fact, 76% of consumers have said it’s now easier than ever to choose another brand after a subpar experience. A frustrating product issue encourages many customers to look to a competitor that might make them feel more valued through a stronger user experience. 

While marketing teams focus on positive customer experiences to drive sales, the responsibility for customer satisfaction largely shifts to the product team after the purchase. That’s because a key contributor to poor user experiences are bugs and other product defects that impact usability. The product team, therefore, can directly improve the quality of a user experience by reducing the amount of customer-facing product issues.

In B2C markets, consumers know that they can easily turn to a similar product from a competitor, so they expect a very high-quality and innovative experience to stick around. And these consumer expectations are creeping into B2B markets as well. That means product quality plays a fundamental role in building a positive customer experience that retains both B2C and B2B customers.

More Testing Leads to Higher Customer Satisfaction

We already discussed how software testing supports customer happiness during transition phases — such as DevOps adoption — but a quality engineering strategy is crucial to the long-term growth of a business as well. Since quality engineers are responsible for quality throughout the entire user journey, they’re also critical to maintaining a competitive customer experience.

The most straightforward way to improve quality is to increase testing throughout the development process. This might sound expensive and time consuming, but testing early and often can actually minimize the effort to fix bugs. Through automated and AI-augmented testing tools, quality engineers can more easily contribute to delivering a market-leading product that stands out from the competition.

In short, quality engineering is an essential link between development teams and customers. By investing in automated software testing, companies can make a direct impact on customer satisfaction and customer retention without slowing down new product releases. 

Customer Happiness Builds Business Resilience

Most companies recognize that faster release cycles enable development teams to bring new features to market faster, which allows them to attract new customers with innovation during growth periods. But market contractions reveal the true resilience of a business — and a key measure of this is customer retention.

For most businesses, returning customers generate the most revenue because customer acquisition costs continue to rise for both B2C and B2B markets. The ability to improve quality through automated software testing, therefore, can have a greater impact on revenue than delivering new features for some companies.

Continuously improving quality throughout the user experience means existing customers are more likely to remain customers, even during market contractions. That means increasing customer happiness is the key to building business resilience and remaining competitive despite shifts in consumer expectations and market conditions. 

By investing in software testing as part of a quality engineering strategy, companies are really investing in their existing customers. This is the key to growing a competitive and resilient business in today’s loyalty-driven world.

Content provided by Mabl

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Quality engineering is the practice of including quality testing throughout the development lifecycle, with the purpose of delivering a positive user experience that will help you satisfy, retain, and acquire new customers. It is emerging as a complement to DevOps that helps teams overcome common challenges to transformation. By focusing their efforts on quality engineering, development leaders can help their organizations finally achieve DevOps success. 

Software Testing Transformation Supports Customer Happiness During DevOps Transition

Let’s face it: change, even positive change, is hard. Many software companies find themselves trapped between the need to modernize their development pipelines and the concern that the transition will cause too much disruption for their customers. The latter often wins out as most businesses now compete on their customer experience: 75% of American consumers say it plays a major role in their purchasing decisions, and 32% say they’ll leave a brand after just one bad interaction. This highly competitive environment creates an understandable aversion to change that slows many DevOps adoptions.

Building the DevOps journey around technologies and processes that support better customer experiences helps software development teams overcome the inevitable headaches that occur during transitional phases and ensures customers don’t suffer the consequences. According to mabl’s 2021 Testing in DevOps Report, 80% of teams with high test coverage reported high customer satisfaction. This number is impressive on its own, but even more striking when compared to organizations with low test coverage: just 30% of low test coverage teams reported high customer happiness. 

Rather than abandon DevOps adoption in the pilot stage, automating software testing is a low risk, high reward place to embrace automated, collaborative DevOps pipelines without risking the user experience. 

Streamlining Collaboration in DevOps Pipelines

DevOps seeks to support faster, more dynamic development teams by building a shared workflow that emphasizes collaboration. When product owners, developers, and quality professionals can easily work together, they’re able to easily hand off issues so that defects are addressed quickly. It’s no surprise, then, that the further teams were in the DevOps adoption process, the better they felt about collaboration between teams. 

Starting the DevOps journey by evaluating points of collaboration like the handoff between quality teams and engineering addresses a major challenge to DevOps adoption: slow processes and a reluctance to change. Streamlining these essential functions not only helps individual team members see the value in DevOps adoption, it also reduces the likelihood that customers will have a bad experience as the result of a software defect that escaped into production. With defects easier to manage, DevOps teams can focus on improving the product, adding new features, and making the overall customer experience better. 

Closing the DevOps Loop

With just 11% of organizations saying that they’ve reached fully automated pipelines, it’s clear that momentum is still building for DevOps adoption. But while DevOps is still a priority for many software development teams, there are still serious obstacles on the road to success. And as the world enters a new period of highly competitive market conditions, the teams that can successfully modernize their pipelines for iterative, quality-centric development will be best positioned to succeed. The time for DevOps experimentation is over – it’s time for DevOps success. 

Improving software testing with test automation and better cross-functional collaboration processes is an underestimated – and undervalued – avenue to DevOps maturity that can help software organizations finally realize their goals. By emphasizing quality engineering metrics like test coverage and how well quality and engineering teams can collaborate, DevOps leaders will be better prepared to showcase business value and tackle the cultural shifts that continue to inhibit DevOps maturity.

Content provided by mabl. 

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The new testing capabilities are now in beta and will enable teams to identify and resolve accessibility issues before they reach end users.

According to mabl, accessibility is more important than ever, both because of increased digital experiences and updated government regulations. The company said that while software is updated frequently, accessibility checks are often infrequent, even though functional tests are built into the development pipeline. 

“Accessibility is a critical area of quality, as well as an ethical concern that impacts every company – and particularly those with public-facing applications or websites,” said Dan Belcher, co-founder of mabl. “Mabl now empowers quality teams to lead the way in proactively mitigating accessibility issues long before they reach customers, resulting in a better user experience and avoiding costly defects.”

The new accessibility testing capabilities are built on axe-core, which is an accessibility testing engine. The capabilities are fully integrated into mabl’s test automation solution for web, email, PDF, and mobile web testing.

Mabl also noted that combining accessibility testing and actionable reporting will make it easier for development teams to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) versions 2.0 and 2.1.  

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TypeScript 4.5 comes just three weeks after the release candidate and since then, TypeScript 4.5 has undergone several changes. The most notable of these is that ECMAScript module support for Node.js has been deferred to a future release, and is now available exclusively as an experimental flag in nightly releases. 

TypeScript 4.5 also addresses a performance regression in –build mode due to excessive realpath calls for package.json files. This change was made for TypeScript 4.5, but was also back-ported to TypeScript 4.4.4.  

Mabl raised $40 million in Series C

Mabl, an intelligent test automation company, today announced $40 million in Series C funding. The financing round was led by Vista Equity Partners (Vista) with participation from existing investors such as Amplify Partners, GV, Presidio Ventures, and CRV.

Mabl’s low-code test automation solution enables software teams to reduce the effort needed to create, run, and manage reliable end-to-end user interface and API tests in a unified platform. This funding brings Mabl’s total raised to date to $77 million. In addition, Shivan Patel, senior VP at Vista, will join Mabl’s board of directors.

OutSystems partnerships to expand tech education

OutSystems, a low-code solution provider, today announced new partnerships in order to accelerate its commitment to education and building a diversified generation of developers.

A leading component of OutSystems’ push to accelerate its education efforts is a focus on marginalized communities in tech. In pursuit of this, Outsystems is partnering with Women who Code (WWCode), Blacks in Technology, and the Australian Computer Society (ACS) in order to launch new programs and sponsorships. 

With this, OutSystems expanded its Developer Education Program to close the skills gap in the development and technology community. OutSystems has donated software licenses valued at over $10 million, partnering with over 2,300 universities and training more than 58,000 students.

Sumo Logic announced new integrations 

Sumo Logic, the continuous intelligence company, today introduced new integrations with CircleCI and GitLab in order to help development teams build, run, and measure the health of the entire software delivery lifecycle. 

The Sumo Logic Software Development Optimization solution simplifies the way users democratize and unify fragmented data generated by tools used to build and deliver software. With these integrations, CircleCI and GitLab users gain access to the visibility they need to measure and manage the software development and delivery process.

These integrations allow software teams to collaborate better and gain insights to make better data-driven decisions that bring improved performance in order to optimize builds and deployments, balance resources, and identify bottlenecks.

Interas Labs joins Ortelius open-source project

The Ortelius Open-Source community recently added Interas Labs as a new corporate contributor to its open-source team. Ortelius is an open-source microservice catalog that integrates into the CD pipeline. Once integrated, Ortelius tracks versions, usage, and ownership of microservices across clusters. Currently, Ortelius is incubating at the continuous delivery foundation. 

“Interas Labs is a Kubernetes engineering company with the mission of improving our customer’s move to a secure and simplified cloud native platform. We strongly believe in open-source projects. We choose the Ortelius project as it aligns with our corporate mission to simplify a complex microservice architecture,” said Ujwal Yelmareddy, Founder of Interas Labs. 

The post SD Times news digest: TypeScript 4.5 released; Mabl raised $40 million in Series C; OutSystems partnerships to expand tech education appeared first on SD Times.

As we’ve been reporting in SD Times all year, security and governance are two areas in which a lot of time and money are being invested, and developers are increasingly asked to take on a larger role in the development life cycle.

This year’s list of companies to watch reflect those changes in the industry, as startups find gaps to fill and established companies pivot to areas of greater need. 

Here’s the list of companies to keep an eye on in 2022.

APIsec

WHAT THEY DO:  API security

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: APIsec provides a fully automated API security testing platform, giving DevOps and Security teams continuous visibility and complete coverage for APIs. APIsec automates API testing, provides complete coverage of every endpoint and attack vector, and enables continuous visibility.

Cribl

WHAT THEY DO: Observability data collection and routing

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Cribl’s LogStream delivers a flexible solution to enable customers to choose what data they want to keep, in what format, in which data store – and the assurance that they can also choose to delay any or all of those decisions with a complete copy in very low cost storage.

Curiosity Software

WHAT THEY DO: Testing

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: With its mantra of “Don’t trap business logic in a testing tool,” Curiosity offers an open testing platform, and is creating a “traceability lab” that links technologies across the whole SDLC. If something changes in one place, the impact of this change should be identified across requirements, tests, data, and beyond. 

Komodor

WHAT THEY DO: Kubernetes troubleshooting

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: After raising $25 million, the company is positioning its platform as the single source of truth for understanding Kubernetes applications, whereas extant observability solutions tend to take an ops-centric view of things.

Lightstep

WHAT THEY DO: DevOps observability

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: With a new beginning under the ServiceNow umbrella (it acquired Lightstep earlier this year), the company’s ex-Googlers built Change Intelligence software to enable any developer, operator or SRE to understand changes in their services’ health and what caused those changes. This, the company says, will deliver on the promise of AIOps — to automate the process of investigation changes within complex systems.

Mabl

WHAT THEY DO: Automated end-to-end testing 

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Mabl is a low-code, intelligent test automation platform. Agile teams use mabl’s SaaS platform for automated end-to-end testing that integrates directly into the entire development life cycle. Its low-code UI makes it easy to create, execute, and maintain software tests. The company’s native auto-heal capability evolves tests with your changing UI, and comprehensive test results help users quickly resolve bugs before they reach production.

Push Technology

WHAT THEY DO: Intelligent event data platform

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Winners of 12 industry awards in 12 months, the company’s 6.7 release of its Diffusion platform raises the bar for messaging and event brokers.

Rezilion

WHAT THEY DO: Autonomous DevSecOps

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: With $30 million in September Series A funding in its coffers, Rezilion will build out its Validate vulnerability platform based on the company’s Trust in Motion philosophy, and the company expects to add new solutions that help autonomously mitigate risk, patch detected vulnerabilities and dynamically manage attack surfaces.

Rookout

WHAT THEY DO: Live debugging

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: The company this year launched its X-Ray Vision feature for debugging third-party code and of Agile Flame Graphs to profile distributed applications in production, its integration with Open Tracing, and its introduction of Live Logger. And, CTO Liran Haimovitch’s podcast “The Production-First Mindset” is wildly popular.

Spin Technology

WHAT THEY DO: Application security and ransomware protection

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Spin Technology was highlighted as a Top 5 Online SaaS Backup Solutions for the Microsoft Office 365 ecosystem by the Data Center Infrastructure Group. Spin uses of Artificial Intelligence to improve threat intelligence, prevention, prediction, and protection.  It can also enable faster ransomware attack detection and response, as well as automate in backup and recovery, while reducing the need for human cybersecurity experts and leading to time and effort savings for enterprise organizations.

Spectral

WHAT THEY DO: Code security

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Spectral’s platform helps developers ensure their code is secure by integrating with CI tools, by enabling their pre-commit tool to automate early issue detection, and by scanning during static builds with plugins for JAMStack, Webpack, Gatsby, Netlify and more.

Swimm

WHAT THEY DO: Code documentation

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Onboarding, outdated documentation and project switching all slow developers down. By syncing documentation with code, Swimm enables developers to get up to speed more quickly on the projects they’re assigned to.

Unqork

WHAT THEY DO: No-code platform

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Enterprise-grade no-code application platforms such as Unqork have radically expanded the scope and capabilities of no-code. These platforms empower large organizations to rapidly develop and effectively manage sophisticated, scalable solutions without writing a single line of code. Unqork late last year raised $207 million in funding, bringing the company’s valuation to $2 billion. 

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