August 2020 Summaries

BrowserStack's first-ever virtual summit, Breakpoint 2020, attracted over 10,000 registrations from 155 countries. The event featured speakers from Twitter, Trivago, Selenium, Robot Framework, and more discussing topics such as agile testing, quality at speed, decentralized testing, release reconstruction, and testing best practices. Highlights included talks on building an agnostic test framework, transforming testing methodologies, the benefits of new industry trends, solving the build vs. buy dilemma, effective feedback loops, and accessibility testing. All sessions have been recorded and can be viewed at [link].

In this checklist, we share 13 optimizations to improve automated functional testing on the cloud, making it faster, less-flaky, and more efficient. These best practices include targeting an acceptable test execution time, running tests at every pull request, configuring CI setup for efficiency, keeping tests short, executing tests in parallel, preventing queuing with 'blending', using built-in debugging options, testing on the right browsers and devices, testing on different screen sizes, testing on real mobile devices, testing in real user conditions, setting up alerting, monitoring, and bug tracking, and maintaining test hygiene. Implementing these practices can help teams make the most of their cloud testing platform and improve productivity during global lockdowns.

BrowserStack hosted its first virtual summit, Breakpoint 2020, with over 10,000 registrations and 2500 attendees from 155 countries. The event featured 18 speakers discussing topics such as agile testing, quality at speed, decentralized testing, release reconstruction, and testing best practices. Highlights included talks on the basics of Robot Framework by its creator Pekka Klarck, a demo of WebdriverIO by Kevin Lamping, and insights into the future of Webdriver by David Burns, a core contributor to Selenium. All sessions have been recorded and can be viewed at the provided link.

BrowserStack's first-ever virtual summit, Breakpoint 2020, featured over 10,000 registrations and 2500+ attendees from 155 countries. The event included talks on agile testing, quality at speed, decentralized testing, release reconstruction, and testing best practices by speakers from Twitter, Trivago, Selenium, Robot Framework, and more. Key highlights focused on test automation, including visual confidence in every commit, reconstructing releases, simpler cross-browser testing, modern automation approaches, delivering quality at speed, golden rules for test automation, and constraints driving automation. The summit's sessions have been recorded and are available to watch online.

This blog explores Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), their widespread use, design considerations, and quality assessment requirements. APIs are a crucial part of modern operating systems, database systems, computer hardware, and software libraries. They provide abstraction, security, and functionality to applications. The rise of cloud computing has made APIs ubiquitous, allowing for high availability, scalability, easy monitoring, and global deployment. When designing an API, factors such as end-users, hardware capacity, latency, throughput, bandwidth limitations, development time, learning curve, architecture (monolithic or microservices), community support, and language compatibility should be considered. Quality assessment for APIs includes unit testing, functional validation, performance evaluation, load testing, runtime error detection, security checks, interoperability, and compatibility with different versions. Additional quality considerations for cloud-deployed APIs include timezone and timestamps, user locales, performance monitoring, security handling, data regulations across borders, transaction costs, and advanced API protocols and libraries like Apache Thrift, gRPC, GraphQL, Apache Kafka, Falcor, and Apache Avro. Understanding the capabilities and nuances of these technologies is essential for designing, implementing, and testing APIs effectively.

BrowserStack has released new versions of its Local binary and native desktop application, both featuring a graphical user interface (GUI). The company found that nearly 15% of attempts to initiate the Local binary failed, leading to an onboarding problem. To address this issue, they conducted a hackathon in November 2019, which resulted in the development of Local v8 with a more intuitive GUI and additional features. The new version has been well-received by users, exceeding initial goals for adoption and usage. BrowserStack plans to continue improving its Local testing products, including adding Docker support.

BrowserStack has introduced support for Cypress on its Automate platform, becoming the first cloud infrastructure for running Cypress test automation out-of-the-box. This integration allows teams using Cypress to run tests at scale on multiple browsers in parallel without having to continually update browser versions or maintain docker containers at every test run. Key features include cross-browser coverage, parallelization, and easy debugging. The integration is currently in stable beta and can be set up in less than 5 minutes by following three simple steps. Support for Cypress tests is covered in Automate plans and users can also sign up to try it for free.