Version 15 of OctoPerf bring a huge focus on continuous integration and Devops practices. We've taken steps to highlight existing integrations, add many others and we've thrown an entirely new report type on top of it.

Today, we’re excited to announce the Early Access Program for Confluent for VS Code! Confluent has integrated support for Visual Studio with Confluent for VS Code that streamlines workflows, accelerates development cycles, and enhances real-time data processing, all within a unified environment.

Increasingly digital consumption of products and services, along with the shift to remote work and education, have significantly affected how software is developed and tested. According to Deloitte’s “2023 Quality Engineering Trends” report, “new technologies” is still the top factor driving testing spend.

One of our recurring jobs at Tideways is to ensure that all of our instrumentation works with the new and upcoming PHP versions. For us, “working” doesn’t just mean that the results are correct, but that your PHP extension is fast, gathering insights for our customers with a minimal performance overhead.

We are humans, and humans sometimes make mistakes. We make hundreds of decisions on a daily basis, and sometimes those decisions are not entirely based on rationality, but on cognitive biases. Anyone, including testers, can be subjected to the trappings of cognitive biases. Those biases are the result of years of evolutionary adaptation, and they allow us to make quick judgements (we all want to survive). However, they usually aren't the best judgements.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has evolved from being a niche marketing tactic to a fundamental strategy for driving website traffic and conversions. With constant algorithm updates and the increasing competition for search engine rankings, businesses need to stay on top of their SEO efforts. To do that effectively, investing in the right SEO tools is critical.

API testing is critical to modern software development, ensuring that applications communicate seamlessly and function as expected. However, setting up testing environments that accurately mimic real-world conditions can be complex, time-consuming, and costly. APIs often change, and dependencies on third-party services or backend systems can delay the development process, making it challenging to conduct reliable tests in real-time.

When building web applications, it's handy to break down a feature's complex processes into smaller, more manageable pieces, whether by using separate functions or classes. Doing this helps to keep the code clean, maintainable, and testable. An approach you can take to split out these smaller steps in your Laravel application is to use Laravel pipelines. Pipelines allow you to send data through multiple layers of logic before returning a result.

When developers build applications, they need to think about how they will connect their products to data sources. Direct database access vs. REST APIs: which should you pick? Both currently stand out as two of the most popular options. Let’s explore the pros and cons of each so you can determine whether API-led connectivity serves your needs.