November 2019 Summaries

Designing for developers and QAs requires a deep understanding of their ecosystem, workflows, and tools. Key points include knowing the developer's environment, making proof of concept effortless, enabling users to work faster not harder, creating good documentation, and always being curious about the user's needs. By focusing on these aspects, designers can create products that seamlessly integrate into developers' existing environments and help them deliver quality software more efficiently.

BrowserStack has released a new redesigned dashboard for Automate and App Automate in beta, aiming to help developers build amazing experiences by providing a world-class test infrastructure of 2,000+ real mobile devices and browsers. The Product team at BrowserStack followed a comprehensive research process that included analytics, support tickets, feedback from sales, and customer interviews to identify key problems with the existing dashboard. They then developed guiding principles for the new dashboard based on these insights. Over an 8-week period, they went from paper sketches to wireframes to hi-fidelity designs, focusing on ruthless prioritization, religious dogfooding across all teams at BrowserStack, and gathering user feedback early with small groups of customers. The new dashboard features optimized performance, search and filter capabilities, and simplified log navigation for easier debugging.

The article discusses the importance of end-to-end testing for eCommerce platforms, especially during peak shopping seasons like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It highlights how front-end bugs can impact customer experience and revenue just as significantly as server downtime. The article suggests strategies to improve quality assurance (QA) in the run-up to these high-traffic periods, including focusing QA efforts on testing, creating more 'checkpoints' across the release pipeline, and testing against a wide range of device/browser combinations. It also provides resources for further reading on this topic.

Fragmentation in software development refers to the variety of devices, operating systems, screen sizes, and browsers that can access a single piece of code. This fragmented landscape creates compatibility issues, as the same code may behave differently on different device-browser combinations. To address this problem, testing should be performed on commonly used devices, operating systems, and browsers to ensure cross-browser-device compatibility. Additionally, it is crucial to test responsiveness across various screen resolutions. By combining these recommendations with website traffic data, developers can determine the most suitable set of devices for their users.

BrowserStack has joined the GitHub Student Developer Pack, offering students free access to its premium web and mobile app testing platform. Students can use features of BrowserStack's products worth $2,388/year for free, enabling them to test on 2,000+ real browsers and devices. This partnership aims to empower developers to create high-quality software by providing an efficient way to test and debug their applications.