Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

It’s hard to overstate how challenging software development is today. The market for web and mobile applications is more competitive than ever. Customers expect their applications to deliver a flawless, beautiful, and intuitive experience every time. Hiring and retaining high-quality software developers and engineers feels next to impossible given the low unemployment rate for IT professionals (just under 2% in the U.S. according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).

Automated testing early in the pipeline for both web and mobile applications has become the standard for most development teams. Catching issues when they are faster, easier, and cheaper to fix provides tremendous value to a business both financially and through the improved quality of end-user experience.

In a perfect world CIOs, CTOs, devs and QA teams would be perfectly aligned. Software would always function the way it was intended, security breaches would be a thing of the past and the movie Top Gun 2 would stop being delayed. Unfortunately, the world is imperfect, but there is a silver lining. Today’s CIOs understand the importance of quality, speed and the value of software testing.

In a recently posted article on DZone, “Microservices: Good for Developers’ Mental Health,” Sauce Labs engineer, Simone Pezzano, addresses the link between developer confidence and mental health in today’s new workplace. Pezzano tells the story of his team’s bumpy start on their journey from monolith to microservices. Initially, Pezzano viewed microservices as a scary concept with rapid release cycles and shorter testing times.

“Let’s get to the point” is something we’d all love to say in certain situations. The talkative restaurant server. The aunt who tells the same story over and over. The cooking blog that tells the author’s entire life story before the recipe. These people love to talk but they can’t read the room. They make the listener/reader work extra hard to understand the point, like finding a needle in a haystack.

For those not familiar with the acronym MTTR, ‘Mean Time to Recovery’, is the average time your organization takes to bounce back from a product or system failure. All DevOps stakeholders want this number to be low, as it is a good proxy for your organization’s ability to understand and improve its overall processes. Also, low MTTR scores are strongly correlated with customer satisfaction ratings! But we aren’t talking about DevOps metrics today.

My grandmother used to say, ‘There’s more than one way to bake a cake.’ It’s a softer version of the more famous idiom involving feline taxidermy, but for our purposes, it’s a better metaphor. You can bake a cake without some of the key ingredients like sugar or eggs and it is still technically a cake. It just won’t taste as good as my grandmother’s cake did.

We are excited to announce that Windows 11 is now available on Sauce Labs to run tests using Firefox, Chrome, and Chromium Edge. As your team looks to accelerate automated testing by running tests in parallel, Sauce Labs gives you the ability to test against the most recent version of every operating system, ensuring that you're maximizing your OS and browser coverage.

Your mileage may vary on Ryan Gosling films. I happen to be a fan, and I always chuckle during the climactic scene in The Notebook. Drenched in rain, Gosling says to Rachel McAdams’ character, “It wasn’t over. It still isn’t over.” He of course is talking about their relationship, but I could easily draw a parallel here with testing. While in the past it may have seemed that a tester’s job was done once code was pushed into production, that is no longer the case.

If you have ever seen the 1976 movie ‘All the President’s Men’ you may remember the phrase “follow the money.” The idea behind this is that political corruption could be exposed merely by looking at financial transfers between parties. In testing, I like to give a slight tweak on this phrase and say, ‘follow the revenue.’ What does this mean? Plainly, we should focus most of our testing efforts in the ways that we will see the most positive return.