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Half of organizations are still utilizing manual testing to validate applications, and the current testing techniques are unable to meet the quality engineering demands for their digital products and services. This is according to Applitools’ recent 2022 State of UI/UX Testing Report. The survey includes feedback from testers, developers, QA managers, and UI/UX designers from almost 1000 companies. The report also showed that while demand for techniques such as frontend testing is quickly building, only 30% of organizations surveyed are actively testing for an application’s ease-of-use and visual correctness on each new deployment to production.  According to the report, the biggest UI/UX challenge that organizations currently face is that the UI is continuously changing across applications and device types. With this comes consistent test maintenance and stability issues for engineering teams.  With 38% of companies deploying changes to production everyday, there has been a signif

Pipelines are an important part of the Jenkins ecosystem for CI/CD, and one important iteration of the pipeline concept is called the declarative pipeline. SD Times, in partnership with CloudBees , recently hosted a webinar called “ Modernize Your Pipelines with Best Practices Built-In ,” to talk about the benefits of these.  But to understand why CloudBees, which is an enterprise sponsor of Jenkins, is pushing for people to use declarative pipelines, we have to go back and take a look at the history of pipelines in Jenkins.  Darin Pope, developer advocate at CloudBees, explained that the first iteration of a pipeline was essentially just chaining together freestyle jobs, which are sequential tasks that the developer can define.   According to Pope, some of the downsides of freestyle jobs are that they are not auditable without installing extra plugins and you are bound to the Jenkins UI, which doesn’t allow for building some of the more complex workflow features, such as flow cont

Amazon announced it is open sourcing the Cloudscape Design System, which is a solution for building web applications.  Cloudscape consists of a set of guidelines to create web applications, along with the design resources and front-end components to streamline implementation. AWS created it in 2016 to improve the user experience across AWS web applications and has used it in the AWS Management Console.  “We are releasing Cloudscape as open source so that anyone building cloud products can benefit from our design system, and also join a community of designers and developers who continually improve it. Whether you’re building a product that extends the AWS Management Console, designing a user interface for a hybrid cloud management system, or setting up an on-premises solution that uses AWS, Cloudscape offers a solid base of 60+ components, 30+ pattern guidelines, and 20+ demos to make your work easier,” AWS wrote in a post .  Cloudscape supports a number of visual modes, enables ac

The team at Microsoft recently announced that the Windows Community Toolkit Labs is now the primary way that the company will be developing new features for Windows Community Toolkit . It is intended to act as a safe space for collaboration and engineering solutions from the prototyping stage all the way through polished and finalized component. According to Microsoft, the Windows Community Toolkit Labs will make it easier for users to contribute to the toolkit, try out new features still in development, and cooperate together on the development process. The new “Labs” repository will hold discussions about new items and development along with initial ‘experiments’ that will each represent a new component (or set of related components) that will begin its journey from an initial implementation to a well-tested feature working through a defined set a criteria and quality gates along the way. With Windows Community Toolkit Labs users can make changes in Labs, try out new ideas, and

Over a decade ago, Internet and tech entrepreneur Marc Andreesen penned a prescient article for The Wall Street Journal, Why Software is Eating the World . His thesis, that software allowed for vast cost reductions in businesses, and enabled the complete disruption of once-staid markets, has been proven many times over. But while Mr. Andreesen’s observation was focused on what the ubiquity of software meant for market winners and losers, there is a correlated impact on the very nature of software development. Specifically, the universality of software across businesses, and the entire technology landscape, has resulted in a level of complexity never before seen by humans. Software is, literally, everywhere. From the IoT microcontrollers of intelligent lightbulbs to vast massively parallel supercomputers, virtually every aspect of how the world operates depends on software. When software-driven systems work, they make our lives easier, less expensive and, arguably, more fulfilling. Bu

 Our previous story was devoted to delayed feedback. Today let’s look at what noisy feedback means for the speed of digital product delivery. As you may recall from Part One, Alice joined the company to work on a digital product, with the specific goal to accelerate delivery. The engineering team was relatively small, about 50 engineers, with three cross-functional teams of 6 engineers, shared services for data, infrastructure, and user acceptance testing (UAT). Analysis showed that the largest amount of time spent in the product delivery process  was spent in testing after code development was completed. Alice learned that the team has an automated regression suite that runs every night (4 hours) and always has about a 25% failure rate for 1,000 tests. Some engineers even tried to fix these issues, but they didn’t have time because of the release deadline and feature development priority, so no one had done anything substantial about it. To keep the ball rolling and continue featu

Amazon is hosting its Alexa Live 2022 conference for developers building skills, which are sort of like applications, for Alexa-powered smart home devices.  According to Amazon, there are hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices in use, and building skills for Alexa provides developers with a good opportunity to engage with those customers in new ways. “Last year, customers engaged with Alexa skills 10s of billions of times, and this is just the skill side of things, this isn’t asking for the weather or the time or things like that, but it’s the actual third party experiences that developers have built. Twenty percent of all Alexa interactions involve customers engaging with a skill,” Jeff Blankenburg, chief technology evangelist for Alexa at Amazon, told SD Times. The company made a number of announcements at the event to help developers create better Alexa skills, including the new Alexa Learning Lab and the Skill Quality Coach. The Alexa Learning Lab is a resource that ca

CompTIA and ConnectWise launched a new training program to expand the nation’s cybersecurity and technology workforce through paid apprenticeships. The collaboration was announced following the recent Cyber Workforce and Education Summit at the White House where the Cybersecurity Apprenticeship Sprint challenged IT leaders to expand Registered Apprenticeships in cybersecurity.  “We focus so much on top level cybersecurity experts that we forget the majority of this work is done by rank-and-file cyber professionals,” said Todd Thibodeaux, the CompTIA president and CEO, who participated in the White House summit. “They work with end users, maintain and secure networks and defend against phishing and other threats to keep everyone and everything working securely. It is with these frontline positions where the most sizable staffing deficits exist, something we intend to address with this program.” According to data from CyberSeek , there were 714,548  job postings for cybersecurity job

Dennis Ritchie, a computer scientist is most popularly known for creating the C programming language. Dennis grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and attended ‘Summit High School’ in Summit, New Jersey. He was a star student in the classroom, earning consistently good grades. He went on to study applied mathematics and physics at Harvard University. When he started working at Bell Labs in 1967, he began working on his PhD. However, he was not able to complete his education. At Bell Labs he made friends with Ken Thompson and together they began developing the ‘Multics’ operating system. Dennis invented the programming language ‘C’ and the operating system ‘Unix’ while working at the University of California, Berkeley. Over time, Unix operating system gained popularity, and C programming language became the most widely used. Dennis and his colleague Ken Thompson received a ‘Turing Award’ in 1983 for their contributions to computer science field. Along with the “National Medal of Technolo

The productivity tools company, JetBrains , recently announced that its complete platform for software development, Space , is now available on-premises in beta. This offering comes with Docker Compose and Kuberntetes installation options.  Space brings users an all-in-one platform that covers Git hosting, code review, CI/CD, package repositories, issue tracking, documents, and chats.  On top of this, users gain access to a remote development toolset and native integration with JetBrains IDE. According to the company, Space is customizable and can be extended to meet the specific needs of any company in the industry. It also works to eliminate context switching by simplifying the developer’s work and leading them to focus on their tasks with minimal distractions. JetBrains Space On-Premises for Docker Compose offers users a lightweight and simpler way to run Space On-Premises on a single Docker host. With Compose, customers can use a YAML file in order to configure the services o

Organizations realize the importance of test automation but many struggle to make a move to automation on mobile.  The inception of mobile testing wasn’t as user-friendly for developers when compared to web testing, for example, and the difficulties still last today, according to Kobiton’s DevOps evangelist Shannon Lee, in the SD Times Live! webinar, “Creating and implementing a test automation strategy for mobile app quality.” “For the web, people made it so that it’s more friendly to develop together. Whereas mobile applications, we really saw kind of that capitalism come into a place where we are now divided; we have the Android platform and we have the iOS platform,” Lee explained. “The iOS platform really only works well with other iOS tools, whereas Android is a little bit more agnostic and open. The rules of the road are just a little bit more complicated.” Also, while Selenium was released in 2007, paving the way for additional open-source frameworks for web development, App

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced that Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0 is now an official web standard.  The new type of verifiable identifier doesn’t require a centralized registry and it will enable individuals and organizations to take better control of their online information while providing greater security and privacy, according to W3C.  Users will be able to take email addresses and social network addresses along with them whenever they want to switch between service providers, and this information can last for as long as their controller wants to continue using them in a similar way to how some individuals can take their mobile number with them when switching carriers. DIDs also enable the controller to verify ownership of the DID using cryptography, allowing for more trustworthy transactions online.  “Fundamentally, Decentralized Identifiers are a new type of globally unambiguous identifier that can be used to identify any subject (e.g., a person, an or

Stytch, an API-first passwordless authentication company, introduced a new password-based authentication solution “rebooted for the modern era.”  The idea behind the solution is to create a way for companies to ease into passwordless by not quitting passwords cold turkey since a full 85% of IT and security professionals don’t think passwords are going away completely yet, according to the company.  “The design of password authentication really hasn’t changed much over the past few decades. We knew that if Stytch was going to take the plunge into passwords, we’d need to design a fresh and modern solution to elevate both security and user experience,” the Stytch team wrote in a blog post . “To support our customers and ensure users are given a low-friction yet secure experience, we’ve completely reimagined password-based authentication from the ground up.” Stytch built four innovations into into Passwords solution: Breach detection: Stytch now integrates with HaveIBeenPwnd, a webs

Microsoft has made its monthly update for Java in Visual Studio Code. This update includes built-in support for the Lombok library, drag and drop support, an exclusion list for inlay hints, and more.  Some Visual Studio Code users had been reporting to Microsoft that when they have Lombok dependencies in their projects, some extensions wouldn’t work as they are supposed to. After investigating this issue, Microsoft made the issue to provide built-in support for the library so that developers wouldn’t have these issues.  The company also enabled a Drag and Drop feature in the Java Project Explorer view. This will allow developers to do things like drag a class from one package to another, drag a package into another package, and drag a JAR file from the operating system to a Java project.  It also added a way to hide Inlay Hints under certain circumstances. Inlay Hints is a feature that was introduced in April and it shows hints about the parameter names for unfamiliar methods. Micro

When you hear about the impacts of not protecting your application, you most often think of the financial loss. It’s no wonder though: the average cost of vulnerabilities is about $13 million dollars, spread across fines, the cost of remediation, and the cost of preventing data leakage. It’s not even factoring in the cost of damage to a company’s reputation after a breach, where customers might not want to continue using the company’s services out of mistrust, according to John Brawner, director of support at the application security company PreEmptive . But there’s another big loss to consider: intellectual property (IP) loss. When IP is lost, it can mean competitors are now able to copy, steal, or leverage your IP in their own applications.  A recent example of this is when American Superconductor, which produces clean energy solutions, lost its IP to one of its customers, Sinovel. Sinovel refused a shipment of components and refused to pay the millions of dollars it owed for t