July 2013 Summaries

The author of the guest post, Matthew Edwards, is a mobile automation team lead at Aquent and was inspired by Google's approach to catching bugs using rooted x86 emulator images with hardware acceleration. He wanted a solution that didn't require working for Google, so he turned to Appium and Sauce Labs as alternatives. Edwards found that Appium allows him to run tests on both Android and iOS platforms using the standardised WebDriver protocol, and he has been running his Woven app's tests on Sauce Labs since its announcement. He notes that Sauce Labs offers a more effective service than other providers, which focus on physical devices and charge high prices. Edwards also advocates for standardising testing technology with the WebDriver protocol, allowing for easy swapping out of underlying testing technologies without rewriting tests. He uses Appium to run his tests on Ruby on OS X, and has found that it enables him to use best-of-breed testing technology from Apple and Google while retaining flexibility for future additions.

Mocha Sauce is a bleeding edge project that connects Mocha with Sauce Labs, created by Paul Bakaus as part of his work at Zynga. It was initially developed as a fork of mocha-cloud but has since become a standalone project with additional features and improvements. The goal of Mocha Sauce is to enable unit tests to run in the browser, as a pre-commit hook, in multiple remote VMs / browsers, and integrated with Jenkins for continuous integration. To achieve this, it builds on existing libraries such as mocha-phantomjs and Sauce Labs, which provide features like running tests in a headless browser and automatically instantiating a pristine remote virtual machine. Mocha Sauce aims to address the missing link between these technologies by providing advanced features like using Sauce Connect to create a local tunnel for testing firewalled or local URLs in VMs. The project is still alpha code, but it has been successfully used in production at Zynga and is being actively developed with community feedback.

Sauce Team has been designed to make collaborating around Sauce easy and useful by providing a better insight into the status of team's tests and builds. The new account dashboard offers an easier way to manage account information, while the test results page provides a simplified way to find failed tests across recent builds. A new "team page" allows for easy user management and usage tracking within teams, making collaboration and diagnosis of test issues more efficient. These features aim to simplify the Sauce experience, improve test diagnosis, and enhance team collaboration.

Sauce Labs has raised $5 million in Series C funding from Toba Capital, Scott Banister, and existing investors to support its global expansion and grow its support, service, and go-to-market strategies. The company will use the funding to expand sales and portfolio to support every type of web and mobile application. With over 50 million tests run since 2009, Sauce Labs has seen significant growth in test execution, with 6 million tests executed in June by 10,000 users, growing at over 10% each month. The company is used by leading consumer and enterprise brands, including Dropbox, Eventbrite, and Mozilla, and is investing to support the needs of larger enterprises with cloud-based application development tools. Sauce Labs' scalable, managed cloud testing service supports multiple browser, operating system, and device platforms, providing high availability and low-latency access to test resources.