Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

High tech companies that use their own solutions project confidence to their customers that solutions truly work. Many teams across Stackify use Retrace internally, and my time in customer support gave me great insights into how our customers relied on Retrace to ensure applications consistently delivered a great user experience.

Before we can release our software to end users, we must perform different kinds of tests to ensure that the application is bug-free and meets business requirements. When users begin using the application, various things can cause the application to behave unexpectedly, for some of the following reasons: For large-scale applications, these things are crucial to know before a full-fledged release.

In software testing or platform engineering, having realistic data is crucial. For years, teams have relied on Test Data Management (TDM) to copy entire production databases, scrub any sensitive information, and then spin up test environments from these sanitized data sets. While TDM gets the job done, it can be costly, time-consuming, and can quickly become outdated.

APIs often represent the cutting edge of the technology space. This is especially true with Artificial Intelligence – as AI has evolved from speculative technology to mass adoption, it has shown up significantly in APIs as a modality and mechanism. However, as with all new technologies, using AI APIs comes with significant challenges.

Mobile applications are increasingly becoming complex as they provide a wide range of functionalities, catering to diverse use cases across finance, health, entertainment, and other industries. Application developers need to ensure compatibility across a wide range of devices, operating systems, and screen sizes. It is challenging to ensure a bug-free user experience, as manually testing all the features across devices would require a lot of time and effort.

Playwright isn’t a testing framework. Sure it’s got assertions, scripted behaviors, even controls over environments. But testing isn’t Playwright’s only purpose. Playwright is an automation tool. It can carry out any browser-based action consistently, and carry out instructions robustly. Locators for buttons and other elements aren’t visual or CSS class-based, but based on ARIA role, and even small styling changes won’t make the scripted action fail.

Frequently in support conversations and posts on Playwright forums, a problem has come up that’s a little bit hard to describe, but comes down to synchronous testing: developers writing a series of Playwright tests that operate on the assumption that one of the tests will either run first or run last, and perform the function of a setup and cleanup script.