Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

It’s been more than a year-and-a-half since we started using Cypress for our automated functional testing, and it has been well worth the investment. Cypress has now become an essential part of our process to automate regression testing, which helps us ship new releases faster, with increased quality.

In Part 1, we looked at some best practices for getting started with creating effective test suites for critical application workflows. In this post, we’ll walk through best practices for making test suites easier to maintain over time, including: We’ll also show how Datadog can help you easily adhere to these best practices to keep test suites maintainable while ensuring a smooth troubleshooting experience for your team.

Here at Mattermost, our team of developers and quality assurance analysts are proud of what we build and work hard to ship a quality product on the 16th of each month. However, maintaining our high bar for quality month over month isn’t without its challenges!

Test automation helps increase development speed while reducing cost and effort. In this article, we will share how to automate testing to help keep a test automation initiative on the right track with key tips for test execution, design and maintenance for large enterprise applications.

For a website to succeed in 2020, it’s not enough for your content to be engaging. As we all spend more time online, we want websites to be fast and the experience to be seamless. Those that don’t will lose out on customers even if their content is top-notch. Cutting down on your website’s loading time is one of the best ways to improve the overall user experience (UX).

Here at Moogsoft, we take quality seriously and one of the most important goals for our test suites is to catch issues early on in the development process. A lot of our automated tests are integrated into our CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) pipeline as gates that can block a merge request with quality issues. Therefore, to ensure stable CI/CD pipelines as well as quick and quality releases to production, it is important to have tests that are stable and lightweight.

The most successful software development movement of my lifetime is probably test-driven development or TDD. With TDD, requirements are turned into very specific test cases, then the code is improved so the tests pass. You know it, you probably use it; and this practice has helped our entire industry level up at code quality. But it’s time to take a step beyond TDD in order to write better software that actually runs well in production. That step is observability driven development.

Browser (or UI) tests are a key part of end-to-end (E2E) testing. They are critical for monitoring key application workflows—such as creating a new account or adding items to a cart—and ensuring that customers using your application don’t run into broken functionalities. But browser tests can be difficult to create and maintain. They take time to implement, and configurations for executing tests become more complex as your infrastructure grows.