March 2020 Summaries

The Solution Architects and Information Developers at Sauce Labs have reworked some Python example code to help with test automation projects. The new samples are available in the Sauce Labs Training Demo Python repository and cover onboarding modules for novice users, Appium and Selenium examples for experienced users, and concise code snippets for using Sauce Labs virtual devices and real devices. Pytest is the preferred choice of test tooling with Python due to its popularity and activity in the Python community, as well as its ability to provide both test writing utilities and a command-line test runner. Robot Framework is another popular testing tool that allows tests to be written in an English language format for collaboration with non-developers, and it has integration with Appium and provides reporting by default. Overall, Python is a great choice for any team starting a test automation project due to its ease of learning, resources, and popularity among Sauce Labs users.

Sauce Labs is a cloud-based app testing service that integrates with popular CI servers and enables users to run automated tests using Selenium in parallel across multiple browsers. With its API and plugins, users can quickly set up and integrate their testing into the framework, obtaining a full report of test results with metadata, videos, screenshots, and console logs. Sauce Labs provides secure and easy access to hundreds of OS and browser versions, including Android, iOS, and Mac OS X, making it an ideal choice for organizations looking to automate their web and mobile app testing.

The global population is increasingly relying on digital services to cope with the new normal of social distancing and remote working. Companies that provide these critical services face a situation where a flawless user experience is crucial for winning market share and serving customers in need. Digital confidence is key, referring to the idea that everyone in an organization expects applications to function, look, and perform as intended. It empowers engineering teams to iterate and introduce innovative features at speed without fear of breaking anything, gives leadership a sense of relief, and ultimately improves customer trust and repeat business. To create digital confidence, organizations focus on comprehensive testing, on-demand testing environments, accelerating release velocity, and introducing reliable quality checkpoints throughout the pipeline. Sauce Labs has resources such as Continuous Testing Benchmark and ROI studies to help teams improve their testing strategy and achieve business growth through continuous testing with a cloud-based vendor.

With the growing importance of mobile devices, manually testing mobile apps across multiple browsers on various devices is no longer feasible. To speed up testing and scale with agile development, automating testing using tools like Selenium or Appium on Sauce Labs' Cloud is recommended. Sauce Labs offers a comprehensive mobile test automation cloud that enables testing of native, mobile web, and hybrid apps on over 80 different iOS and Android simulators and emulators in parallel, reducing testing time from hours to minutes. By joining the platform, developers can automate their mobile browser testing and start a free 14-day trial to begin testing right away.

Sauce Labs provides a comprehensive automated testing cloud for Selenium tests with thousands of browser/OS/device combinations that are constantly updated and always available. It takes the cost and burden of maintaining an in-house Selenium Grid off your hands, allowing developers to focus on writing code. The platform offers over 2000 browser/OS/device combinations, integrations with popular CI servers, scalability, debugging tools, front-end page load performance analysis, visual testing, and test analysis recommendations. By using Sauce Labs, organizations can remove the maintenance burden associated with their in-house Selenium Grid and improve their overall testing efficiency.

Selenium is the most widely used and well-supported testing framework for web app development, offering bindings for multiple scripting languages to write tests in the language of choice. It leverages a large community of experts and provides comprehensive testing and versatility without maintenance costs. Sauce Labs offers an online Selenium testing platform with features such as concurrent testing, cloud-based scalability, secure communications, complete test logs, and video analysis to find and fix bugs quickly. The platform is ideal for Dev teams who want to automate their tests in the cloud on pristine VMs, reducing testing time and ensuring accurate results. With its free 28-day trial, Sauce Labs provides a convenient starting point for online browser tests.

Sauce Labs supports Selenium tests for iOS through its open-source mobile automation framework Appium, allowing developers to run native, hybrid, and web app tests on iOS simulators or real devices. With Appium, developers can write tests in their preferred language and run them in parallel, accelerating testing time by 10x. The Sauce Labs cloud platform provides scalability and support for various iOS configurations, making it an ideal choice for organizations testing mobile apps. Appium supports cross-platform testing, any programming language, and seamless cloud testing, enabling developers to test their app as-is without requiring an SDK recompile.

iPhone Simulator is a crucial step in mobile app development as it allows developers to test their apps across multiple mobile browsers and devices efficiently. Manually testing each browser on each device is a slow process that can't keep up with agile development cycles, which require frequent releases. To speed up testing, automation using frameworks like Appium is necessary, allowing tests to run on hundreds of simulators, emulators, and real devices. This ensures the quality of the app before it reaches users, while Sauce takes care of device maintenance, security, and cleanup, enabling developers to focus on creating apps rather than managing infrastructure.

Sauce Labs enables you to run your Selenium tests in parallel to significantly reduce testing time by up to 10x, while maintaining a secure and convenient infrastructure. With over 1 million tests run daily, Sauce Labs has the capacity to handle large volumes of testing, ensuring compatibility across various OS and browser versions. By integrating with CI/CD workflows, Sauce Labs further streamlines testing processes, providing users with speed, coverage, and security benefits that enhance their automated testing capabilities.

Sauce Labs is introducing a new feature called Failure Analysis that uses machine learning to analyze test pass/fail data and identify common failure patterns. The goal of this feature is to help developers and QA teams understand why tests are failing, prioritize their efforts on the most pervasive issues, and improve developer efficiency. With Failure Analysis, leadership can see the positive impact of testing efforts and rest assured that their investment in automation is directly influencing user experience. This new feature is currently available for Enterprise contract customers, but will be rolled out to other plans at a later date.

Monitoring tools like Prometheus, Sumo Logic, and Splunk can help QA teams track the impact of their work on application quality, establish universal KPIs to measure application health and performance, and justify investment in QA. By systematically monitoring applications in production, QA teams can draw relationships between testing routines and application quality, making it easier to plan and optimize QA operations. However, there is a risk that monitoring tools may be misused to make a case against QA, suggesting that sophisticated monitoring tools can replace the need for software testing. This is not entirely accurate, as APM tools are of little use for troubleshooting certain types of issues that QA excels at finding and addressing before deployment. Ultimately, monitoring tools are an important complementary resource for QA engineers, helping to make the overall importance of QA clearer and facilitating collaboration with developers and IT teams.

Gwen Diagram is a talented woman in the testing community who has made significant contributions to her field. She initially started her career in IT Support before transitioning into testing and has held various roles including Scrum Master, DevOps, and Engineering Manager. Gwen is passionate about giving back to the community and organizes the Leeds Testing Atelier. Despite missing hands-on testing responsibilities in her full-time role, she left to pursue her passion. She emphasizes the importance of lifting up other women in technology and speaking out against sexism. Gwen's career highlights include working on an identity system with a disjointed set of tests, which she successfully implemented using Gauge and pure Java. Her advice is to design solutions as a team, sell them well, and have fun doing it. Gwen has been influenced by several key figures in the testing industry, including Lisa Crispin, Janet Gregory, Rosie Sherry, and Alice Goldfuss. She is proud of her experience and encourages others to follow their passions and speak out against sexism.

Mobile testing is crucial for delivering a superior mobile experience. Android and iOS have distinct differences in their architectures, which impact testing challenges. OS version fragmentation adds complexity to testing on Android, with six versions used by around 7% of users, compared to two versions used by more than 6% of iOS users. Device fragmentation is also significant on Android, with a wide range of devices and screen sizes to account for. This can lead to issues with backwards compatibility, usability, and performance. The Google Play Store has less strict review processes, making thorough testing essential for iOS app distribution. To simplify the mobile testing process, organizations can use cloud infrastructure platforms like Sauce Labs' Real Device Cloud, which eliminates the need for a device lab and increases testing efficiency. Mobile testing frameworks like Appium also help with cross-platform testing by allowing single scripts to run on multiple platforms.