The Swift Package Manager allows you to create standalone Swift applications both on Linux and macOS. You can build and run these apps and you have the ability to write unit tests for your codebase. Xcode ships with the XCTest framework, but you may not know that this is an open-source library. It's available on every single platform where you can install Swift.

At the end of the year, I like to look back at what new discoveries I've made and lessons I've learnt as a QA engineer. 2019 has proved to be a bonanza year, with some startling changes in direction for Test and with new technologies and methodologies making a break into the mainstream.

In December, we updated OctoPerf to use the latest JMeter version. Although, as a minor version, it doesn’t bring a lot of new features, it is always better to stay up to date with the latest bugfixes. We had to implement a small change in OctoPerf because JMeter now properly enforces the cache control headers in every situation. To avoid any confusion, cache control headers have now been disabled by default in OctoPerf.

Artificial intelligence works on the principle of human intelligence. The machines are programmed in such a way that they think like humans and can imitate our actions. They can be designed to execute all types of tasks from complex to simple ones. The primary task machines can perform are learning, reasoning and perception.

Writing tests is an underappreciated part of software development. It usually distracts us from our primary goal and makes us feel we aren’t being productive. However, these tests are a great way to ensure our code works as expected, and they can save us plenty of headaches when we don’t have full control of certain parts of a project (for example, when we are working on the client app and another colleague is working on the server).

Nowadays, in the era of instant gratification, when everyone want everything in a matter of moments, understanding the performance of your website, web application, web service is more important than has ever been. Using web performance tools to understand how your application behaves is easy and a best practice that you should follow on a daily basis.

Katalon is establishing a new partnership with CircleCI — the leading platform for continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline. This collaboration marks the official support of integrating Katalon Studio automation capability with the CircleCI infrastructure. Katalon provides a robust cross-platform test automation solution that supports web, application programming interface (API), mobile, and desktop testing for teams with minimum requirements for programming skills.