Every software organization has long balanced the interlock between software developers and software quality assurance testers. While developers aim to build software to business requirements, it’s the QA team’s job to verify that they actually did.

The ultimate goal of writing tests should be improving the user’s in-app experience and increasing developers’ confidence in shipping new or improved apps. The Mattermost team has been continuously writing different types of tests to improve the product. Such extensive automated testing has enabled them to ship a new release—with new features and improvements—every single month for the last few years. Thousands of developers contribute to the codebase.

Today, we hope to make testing Absinthe a bit easier for you. We believe that it’s a great library for writing GraphQL applications, but if you previously haven’t done much work on an Absinthe application, you might find some things a bit tricky to test.

After weeks of writing, researching and hopefully enough proofreading, we just launched a living collection of practical guides on leveraging headless browser tools (starting with Puppeteer and Playwright) for testing, monitoring, scraping, performance measuring and more. We called it theheadless.dev. This article is about the different approaches we tried in contributing ideas to the Puppeteer community, as well as the principles that guide our latest contribution.

Few things are more frustrating than slow, flaky test suites. You're ready to deploy, wait 20 minutes for CI to run, only to find that a test failure in code you've never touched is blocking you. You dig into the source and find the problem: an external API call. It works (slowly) most of the time. But sometimes the network glitches and it fails. What do you do? In this article, José Manuel shows us several techniques for removing external API dependencies from our tests.

In January 2020, the UK recorded its first case of COVID-19. The world was facing the unknown, and the only apparent way to contain the virus was for every nation across the planet to shut down. As governments across the globe planned for the unknown, organizations rapidly began seeking ways to support efforts to save lives and restart the economies of these countries. One such endeavor was the vital role technology could play in contact tracing.