July 2019 Summaries

Appium is an open-source automation library used to test hybrid and native mobile applications by simulating user actions. The technology was introduced in 2012 and has been developed with the contributions of Sauce Labs, a leading contributor to the Appium project. As a relatively new technology, there has been little formal training or certification for Appium, but Sauce Labs offers Appium bootcamp events at professional conferences and plans to introduce a formal training program. This training aims to provide up-to-date information about Appium, help users learn how to use it with Sauce Labs to accelerate app development, and equip developers with the skills needed to create outstanding mobile apps.

Sauce Labs provides emulators for Microsoft Edge browser versions 13 and higher, offering automated testing across all versions, detailed logs, videos, and debugging tools to identify issues quickly, and scalable testing capabilities to reduce testing time by up to 10x. To ensure compatibility with different browser versions and monitor sizes, it is crucial to test web pages continuously, which is where Sauce Labs comes in as a solution for cross-browser testing. By utilizing Sauce Labs, developers can be sure their apps will render properly across various Edge browser versions and user devices.

Sauce Labs provides emulators for all versions of Internet Explorer from version 8 to 11, along with tools and integrations to help continuously test applications. This is necessary to ensure web pages render properly on older browsers like IE, which often struggle with modern graphics and apps. With over 800+ browser/OS combinations available in the Cloud, Sauce Labs offers automated testing, cross-platform testing, detailed logs, videos, and debugging tools to identify issues quickly, and a highly scalable cloud for parallel testing that can reduce testing time by up to 10x.

Sauce Labs is a leading platform for cross-browser and mobile app testing online, utilizing open source frameworks like Selenium and Appium to run automated tests in the cloud. This allows for parallel testing across 900 browser/OS combinations, ensuring error-free apps quickly. With its complete diagnostic suite, secure tunneling, and virtual machines that delete after every run, Sauce Labs provides a safe and controlled environment for testing. The platform offers cross-browser testing, complete control over testing, and is suitable for web and mobile app development, making it an ideal choice for developers looking to speed up their testing and produce bug-free apps.

Safari Browser EmulatorAccelerate Your Tests with Automated Safari TestingToday’s web applications are complex and sophisticated. While web browsers have evolved, many older browsers often have trouble displaying graphics and apps that modern web pages use. This is why testing your web pages is necessary to ensure that it will render properly across all the different web browsers, operating systems, and monitor sizes that your visitors are likely to use. To do this effectively you need access to a wide variety of browsers and OSes to test on. Most only test on PCs, but Macs are increasingly important so testing on Safari browsers is important to give them a quality experience. This is where Sauce Labs comes in with over 800+ browsers / OS combinations (covering Apple Macs and PCs) available to test on instantly in the Cloud.Sauce Labs provides Safari browser emulators for all versions of the Safari browser from version 5 to the latest beta and dev releases so you can be sure your app works on whatever version your users have.Sauce Labs offers automated testing across all versions of Safari, cross-platform testing across MacOS, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android, detailed logs videos and debugging tools to identify issues fast, and highly scalable so you can run tests in parallel and reduce your testing time by up to 10x.To learn more about Safari browser testing on Sauce Labs, sign up for a free trial today.

I joined Josh Grant, Solutions Architect at Sauce Labs, to discuss how environment and feature management can help teams of all sizes embrace continuous testing to keep quality code moving through the pipeline more quickly. We discussed two particular areas where teams can see significant results: Environment Management, where teams need to consider the environments they need for testing throughout the pipeline to improve productivity, decrease costs, and increase release velocity; and Feature Management, where breaking up monolithic applications into smaller feature branches allows for more test automation and effective CI/CD. By adopting a sound environment management strategy and writing tests at every level, teams can take their CI/CD to the next level and achieve blazing fast speeds in CI/CD.

The future of software testing is expected to include auto-generated tests that allow code to reach the testing stage faster while improving coverage. This approach aims to eliminate the need for manual test writing, generate tests in a uniform way across the codebase, and reduce costs associated with development time of automated tests. Test generation solutions already exist, including open-source tools such as Simulato and Curiosity, which leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to auto-generate tests from models or template files. These tools can generate tests for specific scenarios, reduce test maintenance, and improve testing thoroughness and efficiency. As AI and ML continue to play a larger role in software testing, it is expected that test generation will become increasingly important, allowing developers and testers to focus on more important tasks while improving the quality of life for those responsible for authoring automated tests manually.

Automated testing is a valuable asset to software development organizations, allowing for earlier insight into application quality and facilitating the discovery of bugs at earlier points in the development lifecycle. However, implementing an effective automated testing strategy can be challenging due to common pitfalls such as lack of expertise among team members, building in development time for test automation, inadequate test infrastructure, and unrealistic goals. To overcome these challenges, organizations can leverage testing frameworks that allow utilization of programming languages familiar to their team, build test automation into the agile development process, invest in cloud-based test infrastructure providers, set realistic expectations for automated testing, and develop self-contained test scripts independent of one another.

When an organization lacks a dedicated Quality Assurance (QA) team, everyone else involved in software delivery must work harder to fill the gap. This can be achieved by hiring developers with testing experience or freelance QA engineers, but these options are not practical or responsible for full-scale CI/CD pipelines. Instead, developers and IT staff need to take on more active roles in QA operations, such as writing automated tests, performing "shift-right" testing, providing continuous feedback, collectively owning software quality, being efficient with tools like test automation, and taking ownership of QA due to the lack of a dedicated QA team. By empowering everyone involved in software engineering to contribute to QA, organizations can maintain high-quality software without relying on a full-time QA team.