Live Authoring is Here!

Hey there, how ya been, good to see you, blah blah blah - I'm so excited about this post so let's just get to it!! If you didn't notice, I've even skipped letter "K" to get here. But don't worry, we'll backtrack! I'm just super stoked to be showing off Virtuoso's latest capability: Live Authoring!!! Let's see how many exclamation points we can fit into one post, shall we?

I've been pumped about this update for a while, and props to our awesome dev team for making it an amazing one! The idea behind Live Authoring is to make your testing faster than ever before. Before with Virtuoso, you would write out your test, execute it, and then fix anything that failed. NLP makes the process a lot faster than standard test authoring in other tools, but we decided it still wasn't fast enough. Now when you're writing your test, Virtuoso runs through the steps simultaneously on the right of the screen, so you can see Virtuoso walk through your steps as you write. This is what I like to call a "soft execution" of your test. Your test will still be executed (as I discovered when I accidentally registered for one of our Webinars six times...oops!), but the Live Authoring won't produce all of the test results that a normal test execution would. This way, you can instantly see any tests that fail and fix them as you go.

I had way too much fun playing with the Live Authoring, jumping around to different parts of the website. My goal was to use as many of the different commands that we've learned through this series as I could, so I started out by hovering over the navbar so I could head to the Features page. Then I looked for a couple of different elements so we could jump around the page. A cool feature to note is that you can actually scroll up and down the page that's in the preview pane. I nipped over to the Book a Demo page to play with clicking different types of selectors, switching between iFrames, and entering data. I love the way that you can see Virtuoso enter data into the field one letter at a time; it's just really aesthetically satisfying!
Then I looked at *shudder* Advanced Mode. This toggleable mode is full of Dev tools, and honestly... I have no idea what they all do. There are a ton of different tabs with information that (I assume) is for devs to make the most out of. The Advanced Mode pulls up the inspect pane for the site, which would've been great back when we did iFrames and needed to inspect the site to find the name of the iFrames.

I had plans to stay on the Virtuoso site, but I just couldn't control myself, so it was time to hop over to the rocketshop! This is where I ran into my first speed bump. I use rocketshop.virtuoso.qa as the URL, but that URL actually has to redirect to something else, and when the step after the "navigate to" step failed, I knew something was up. Once I put in the true URL, Virtuoso was able to load the rocketshop a lot faster, so I was cutting down on the time required to run the test because of Live Authoring!

There are a couple of other little things I found cool that I point out in the video above, so be sure to check it out! I certainly hope that you all are as excited by Live Authoring as I am, and I hope that your test authoring goes even faster now! And if you're not using Virtuoso then, c'mon, this is my twelfth video - what are you waiting for?? Check us out here, and happy testing!