April 2020 Summaries

BrowserStack has removed user limits for its Automate and App Automate products, allowing any number of users within an organization to run tests and debug issues without additional cost. Users will only be charged based on the number of parallels used. This change aims to improve collaboration among developers and QA engineers, speed up debugging processes, and enable organizations to ship high-quality software without worrying about pricing barriers. The new policy is effective immediately for existing subscriptions.

BrowserStack Summer of Learning is a free 5-part webinar series aimed at helping QA and engineering teams learn and scale test automation. The series covers topics such as getting started with Selenium, using BrowserStack Automate, continuous testing at scale, effective parallelization strategies, maintaining test hygiene while scaling, and testing for a mobile-first market. The webinars begin on May 1st and will be available weekly. Registration is open to all interested participants.

Artur Arseniev is the creator of GrapesJS, a free open source web builder framework that allows users to build HTML templates without coding. The early days of GrapesJS saw unexpected success after being featured on Hacker News' second-chance pool. Encouraging people to use GrapesJS has been organic and it caters to two types of users: those who want to play around with the demo, and those who want to create custom web builders. Arseniev prefers a top-down approach when planning work and advises his younger self to share ideas from day one. He emphasizes the importance of testing in software development and uses Jest framework for this purpose. Building a supportive community for open source projects involves finding the right target, providing good documentation, ensuring test coverage, and better communication and marketing. Arseniev has not worked on any other major open-source projects besides GrapesJS but takes breaks to prevent burnout.

Fragmentation testing is crucial for mobile applications due to differences in device features, APIs, and operating systems. Hybrid apps are the most affected by fragmentation as they rely on native-OS browsers (WebViews) which can vary across devices. Native apps also face issues with different OS versions, while progressive web apps depend on browser-OS-hardware interactions. To prepare for fragmentation, developers should test their apps on various mobile screen sizes, network conditions, and Android/iOS versions. Additionally, hybrid app functionalities should be tested on both mobile OS and browser versions, native apps should be tested on real devices for battery overconsumption and hardware performance issues, and PWA functionalities should be tested on different OS-browser combinations.