Traditionally, Quality Assurance (QA) has been a very manual process. Our QA teams do an amazing job running through test plans, finding critical bugs, and logging reports. But it can be a lot of work to run through the tests again and again, dig into the errors to provide the contextual information developers need to fix bugs quickly, and prepare the reports your developers need to find and fix errors in the codebase.

One of the most well-known problems when it comes to testing applications is the amount of time required by all test suites. Integration tests, in particular, are usually very slow to execute and depending on the type of application, several minutes (or even hours in extreme cases) are needed in order to get the final execution result. You can reduce the test execution time with several techniques, but one of the most effective methods is running your tests in parallel.

Like Grafana Labs, my company, Load Impact, is built on open source. When we set out to build the k6 load testing tool, we knew we wanted to offer a purely open source stack. We’ve done performance testing for the better part of the past 15 years. When we looked at the market a couple of years ago, we saw a lot of both commercial and open source tools, and they were mostly either too simple or too complex. Additionally, there was nothing designed specifically for developers.

These days having a website isn’t enough to keep visitors happy and coming back for more. No, you need a website that is secure, loads quickly, and is free of any bugs. Of course, the only way to ensure this is to test your website on a regular basis. If this is not a task that you want to outsource, there is no need to worry. There are a number of web application testing tools that can help you out.

Whether a team is one person or one hundred, automated testing uncovers issues in an application before the code is deployed to production. The earlier a problem is diagnosed, the cheaper and less impact it has on you (the developer) and the organization.

Our fully managed Selenium testing platform allows you to continuously check your website to ensure it’s working as expected. Not just the fact that it’s online, but that your customers can perform tasks such as registering or adding products to the basket. We use real browsers, such as the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox and test from 18 global testing locations.

In my last post, I talked about the evolution of infrastructure as code and its role in modern software development. To recap, let's take a quick look back at what an IaC process establishes: in a nutshell, IaC is a methodology that enables you to manage your servers and deploy your applications purely through code. Through some configuration language saved to a file, you define the resources and packages that servers need.

One of the basic ingredients of any software is that before you deliver it to the end user you want to make sure that it works properly. The question is how we need to adapt our approach to testing to take account of the cloud-based, highly distributed nature of serverless architecture.

So you want to A/B test your web app. The idea is simple, but the details can get messy, and you don’t want to re-invent the wheel. Services like Optimizely are pretty good, but they can be expensive and full of features you don’t need immediately. In this post, we’ll share how Sentry wrote an experimentation system with minimal work.