The latest News and Information on Software Testing and related technologies.
When it comes to the applications, websites, and services we build, the end user ultimately determines whether or not the end product is successful. Even the greatest concepts can fall short if the application does not consistently meet the evolving needs and expectations of the user. Just look at what happened to sites like Myspace or Yahoo.
Building, running and scaling SaaS demo systems that run around the clock is a big engineering challenge. Through the power of traffic replay, we scaled our demos in a huge way. A few weeks ago we launched a new demo sandbox. This is actually a second generation version of our existing demo system that I built a few months ago (codename: decoy). Because the traffic viewer page shows the most recent data by default, you need to constantly be pumping new data in there. Any type of real-time SaaS system is going to have a similar requirement. So this needs to be planned.
Development is no longer a linear journey from point A to point B. As more projects shift into a state of organic growth, user feedback and constant experimentation are increasingly becoming the norm, if not the standard for engineering. “In order to support this rapid experimentation, we’re beginning to embrace new working methods and practices,” said Vinodh Ravi, Executive Director of Platform Engineering at JPMorgan Chase.
Performance is a vital component of user experience. Users will leave—and likely not come back—if your site is slow. If they stay, they’ll be less likely to buy from you if their experience is subpar. To add insult to injury, they’re even less likely to find your app to begin with, since Google punishes poorly-performing sites in the search results. To solve the problem of poor performance, knowledge of what impacts performance is essential.
Software is one of the most complex tools invented for practical use. One misplaced character can break an entire application. So, careful testing is an essential requirement before publishing any code. In this article, you will learn about two fundamental types of software testing, unit testing and integration testing, and how your team can implement them in your CI/CD pipelines to validate your code quickly and deliver new features to your users with confidence.
Performance testing is an essential component of building fast and reliable web services. Until recently, this testing typically happened later in the development process and was often performed by a separate team or even a third party. But speed is the competitive advantage for companies, and prioritizing testing during the development process can speed time to market for new applications.
While there is a lot of focus on the three pillars of observability to provide insight into application performance in production, load testing is the other side of the observability story. By using the open source load testing tool k6 — which Grafana Labs acquired earlier this year — developers can simulate real-world traffic to test the reliability and performance of software changes and new features, not to mention flag performance issues before impacting end users.
NestJS is fast becoming the de facto framework for NodeJS projects. Unlike older frameworks, NestJS was built with TypeScript, which has become commonplace in the JavaScript community. Frameworks like NestJS seem to be preferred by teams that adopt TypeScript. NestJS supports building APIs in REST and GraphQL. The goal of this tutorial is to show how you can add unit and integration tests to a NestJS GraphQL project and automate the testing process with CircleCI.
Is it possible to use just one tool to test everything? Although it may sound like a developer’s daydream, it is almost possible with Cypress, a JavaScript frontend testing framework. Cypress is built specifically for JavaScript frontend developers, and they can use it to start writing tests quickly without needing to add third-party dependencies or packages. This is a benefit missing from other tools like Selenium. In this tutorial, I will guide you through using Cypress to test an API.
