SauceLabs Elevating Software User Guide
- June 8, 2024
- SauceLabs
Table of Contents
SauceLabs Elevating Software
Elevating Software Quality:
The Enterprise Guide to Continuous Testing
- As a technical enterprise leader, your teams are responsible for building the most valuable web and mobile experiences on the market. The urgency to develop and release software quickly is more pressing than ever, driven by the high expectations of your customers. It’s essential that your software not only reaches the market quickly but also upholds the highest quality across all stages of development and deployment.
- But you can’t achieve this with outdated testing methods. Staying competitive, retaining customers, and driving revenue all hinge on a strategic approach to testing one that supports continuous quality and provides rapid feedback across the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
- Are you wondering how your testing strategy measures up against those of your enterprise peers, who are already using strategic testing to ensure quality digital experiences?
- This guide offers insights into how leading enterprises are driving engineering efficiency, innovation velocity, and minimizing risks through effective testing practices. Learn how you can upgrade your testing strategy to surpass industry standards and consistently deliver incredible digital experiences.
Why DevOps speeds require flexible test infrastructure with unified
quality management
Limited testing environments can stagnate projects and threaten test stability, significantly impacting the developer experience with increased dev effort and low sprint scope (dev productivity) to ship on time. In worst cases, devs may ship without testing sufficiently or testing at all. Without centralized quality management to provision any mix of flexible test infrastructure (public or private real devices and emulators or simulators with ARM support), limited testing environments pose additional challenges including:
Limited Device Access
As mobile apps and responsive web design become normal, testing on real
devices is critical. However, many teams only have access to a few physical
devices for testing, if any at all. This makes it nearly impossible to test on
the thousands of Android and iOS device types, sizes, and operating system
versions in use today.
Inconsistent and Complex Test Environments
Some software testing tools and even local testing environments are difficult
to configure and maintain. Different operating systems, browsers, and device
types each require a specific setup, and keeping them all up to date is time-
consuming. This often leads to inconsistencies that produce false test
results.
Limited Geographic Coverage
When attempting to scale parallel testing, many teams struggle to test from
different locations around the world, due to the limitations of the software
testing tool in use (i.e., geolocation mocking). This prevents them from
identifying issues that only appear in certain regions or on specific
networks.
Long Test Cycles
Relying on physical devices and local test environments often means long
testing cycles. Configuring environments, executing tests, and analyzing
results can take days or even weeks. This delays releases and slows down
development.
Inefficient CI/CD Pipelines
Managing the compute workloads of automated testing via Cl/CD platforms is far
less efficient and reliable than using an all-in-one quality management
platform with flexible test orchestration capabilities to support a much wider
range of use cases and do so more efficiently.
To overcome these challenges and release with confidence, large organizations
are embracing enterprise-grade unified testing platforms that are scalable,
dependable and secure. Explore what the gold standards are for an enterprise-
ready testing platform.
Meeting the Gold Standards in Automated Web and Mobile App Testing
The Selenium and Appium projects revolutionized test execution by making
parallel test execution highly scalable, reducing overall testing time for
faster feedback and quicker releases.
A unified and continuous testing platform builds on this capability by
securely extending observability into production to power Al-augmented error
reporting and failure pattern analysis. In this way, developers may find and
fix problems easier with fast root cause analysis while development team
leaders simplify continuous improvement by predicting and preventing errors.
Now, teams can rethink regression and iteration efficiency.
Here are five must-haves for enterprises to drive continuous quality at speed
and at scale in their SDLC.
Meeting the Gold Standards in Automated Web and Mobile App Testing
Choice of Public or Private Real Devices
Shipping mobile updates faster-whether to reduce UX friction or go to market
faster than a competitor-is the #1 differentiator for most mobile apps. Over
half of users will abandon an app for poor UX and/or performance. An automated
testing platform helps you mitigate this risk by accelerating secure mobile
testing with a dedicated pool of private devices that eliminate delays due to
session acquisition, teardown, cleaning (as with public real devices), and
team management tasks such as device allocation.
Additionally, private devices allow teams to customize setups with preserved
settings, enabling devs to validate advanced mobile use cases ranging from
Android Talkback to Apple Pay Support, MDM, cellular connectivity (deactivated
WiFi), geolocation mocking, and much more. The right platform helps team
leaders to easily provision workloads between public and private devices for
optimal quality at speed and cost of quality.
Meeting the Gold Standards in Automated Web and Mobile App Testing
Mobile Emulators and Simulators Expand Test Coverage
Shift-left is a popular term in DevOps. In the Agile world, it’s a great
methodology for performing tests earlier in the development lifecycle to
identify issues before they hinder development. Spin up emulators and
simulators before a device is even launched to the public or before an app has
been built for early smoke and sanity testing. Remediating issues in the later
stages of the SDLC is difficult and expensive. Emulators and simulators are a
way to stay one step ahead of potential disaster. Emulators for Android and
simulators for iOS supplement real device testing to get more coverage per
test sprint – more bang for your buck – and minimize the risk of breaking
changes, performance issues, and escaped defects. Enterprises must validate
both INTEL and ARM architecture across real devices and simulators.
The Benefits Of Emulators And Simulators Include:
Better Test Coverage
Highly scalable and efficient, emulators and simulators can efficiently cover
more scenarios in test sprints to ensure test stability and non-flakiness.
Real devices and emulators and simulators with centralized quality management
is key, making it easy to know when, where, and how to improve DevOps Research
and Assessment (DORA) metrics.
Faster Development Cycles
When you can detect issues earlier, you can dedicate more time to improving
the quality of your app and ultimately reduce build times leading to faster
development cycles. With fast root-cause analysis and proactive remediation,
your development cycles run fast and efficiently at any scale.
Better Cost of Quality
If your team is massively scaling parallel testing, control your cost of
quality by moving workloads from real devices to emulators or simulators.
Support both INTEL and ARM architecture for test cases requiring modern
silicon.
Security, Compliance, and Accessibility
A testing platform must be certified and audited to meet the strictest
regulations, including industry-leading compliance certifications such as
SOC2/3, ISO 27701/27001, GDPR, and CCPA. Also critical is being KY3P compliant
– a requirement by many global banking, financial services, and insurance
companies of their vendors. Enterprise-ready means that teams have a trusted
partner to consolidate tools on a platform. Commitment to security and
corporate responsibility provides extra peace of mind that your sensitive
information is protected. What does this look like in practice?
Network Isolation
Preventing unauthorized access to the network by ensuring that data
communication within the platform remains secure, thus keeping your data safe
from external threats. Think of a cloud testing environment as a secure bubble
around your tests, preventing unauthorized access and data breaches.
Data Encryption
Most testing tools offer VPN tunnels and should have high- availability and
super-efficient HTTP/2 tunnels that are robust enough to handle high volumes
of parallel testing with minimal latency. Test behind the firewall at massive
speed, scale, and security.
Access Control/ Authentication and Authorization
Authorization policies such as MFA and user lifecycle management add an extra
layer of security beyond passwords. The access rights are provisioned
according to need-to-know, need-to-have, or need-to-do principles. Regular
access rights reviews are conducted, making it much harder for unauthorized
access.
Enter rise partnership
What an enterprise partnership ultimately means is that there is an accelerated feedback loop between your needs and the vendor, creating a more tailored experience. A renowned commitment to enterprise partnership stands out with the following outcome-driven support and services:
Improve DORA Metrics
Integrating a scalable test infrastructure with enterprise support and
services enables delivery of custom solutions that help you transform testing
into a competitive differentiator with faster innovation and minimized risk of
escaped defects.
Optimize Test Strategies
Modernizing your test strategy in partnership with testing experts and
services teams allows your organization to handle the velocity and massive
scale of regressions, mobile development, web accessibility compliance, and
much more. Make the most of Alaugmented testing with smarter, faster insights
and more effective continuous improvement.
Optimize Cost of Quality At Scale
With a true partnership, development and quality teams gain observability and
Al-powered insights along with expert support and services to know the best
ways to provision flexible test infrastructure for optimal coverage. Minimize
the risk of bottlenecks, breaking changes, and escaped defects.
Walmart adopted continuous testing best practices to execute more than 50K
automated tests per day and save $750K man hours on manual testing.
LEARN MORE➔
Breadth of Device, OS, and Browser Combination s
Forget juggling tools – instead, seamlessly integrate mobile emulators,
simulators, and a Real Device Cloud (RDC), all on a single, unified platform.
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Test Everything Validate across a vast range of devices, browsers, and OS versions, ensuring a flawless user experience for everyone.
-
Manage Quality Achieve continuous quality throughout the SDLC with simplified management of all types of testing in the modern testing pyramid (web, mobile and mobile native apps).
Optimize regression efficiency, automate accessibility compliance, and orchestrate test workloads (via Docker containers) to accelerate remote test executions and manage centralized test environments for a wide range of use cases Support ARM Test with cutting-edge features and upcoming software updates for a future-ready app. -
Optimize Any Framework Bring any workload with any framework and programming language to massively scale parallel testing and concurrency with big, complex test suites; look for native support of Selenium, Playwright, Appium, Cypress, WDIO, Espresso, and other frameworks.
The Enterprise-Ready Journey to Continuous Quality
Juggling disparate yet limited testing tools and environments is exhausting.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that a one-stop automation shop with on-demand
engineering and customer success support is core to your journey to continuous
quality. To recap, an enterprise-ready testing platform should provide:
- The ability to choose between public and private devices
- Mobile Emulators and Simulators for expanded test coverage
- A certified and audited platform
- Enterprise partnership for a more tailored support experience
- Unmatched breadth of coverage on a unified platform
Ready to explore continuous testing done right in your enterprise?
TALK TO A TESTING EXPERT TODAY ➔
About Sauce Labs Sauce
Labs is the leading cloud-hosted platform for automated testing of web and
mobile applications, enabling fast delivery of high-quality software across
the development lifecycle. Founded by the creators of Selenium, Sauce Labs has
been the testing leader for over 15 years and now runs over 1 billion tests
annually. Trusted by Fortune 500 companies like Toyota, Walmart, Verizon,
Gannett, and Fidelity Investments, its scalable, secure platform supports
testing across thousands of operating systems, browsers, and devices while
meeting the highest compliance standards.
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