January 2021 Summaries

To deliver a flawless user experience with every interaction, push notifications have become a crucial medium for businesses to connect and engage with their users. Testing push notifications is critical to thoroughly test various scenarios in mobile apps, including verifying notification receipts, checking if the notification is clickable, and verifying the redirection of the notifications. The Sauce Labs Real Device Cloud allows customers to expedite automated and live testing for their mobile apps, including testing push notifications on both Android and iOS on mobile devices. When it comes to testing on iOS, signing is required through the process of instructing the app that it is allowed to be installed on a specific device. The Sauce Labs Real Device Cloud provides an interactive demo video to help users understand how to test push notifications for Android and iOS, including uploading and installing applications, understanding Apple's capabilities for making push notifications work, and discovering tested workarounds to complete the process.

The new Selenium Grid in Selenium 4 is a refreshed mechanism that allows distributing tests across a fleet of machines, building upon the concept of the original Selenium Farm at Google and the Open Source implementation by Philippe Haringou. The old Grid had limitations such as only speaking the original Selenium RC protocol and requiring manual configuration, whereas the new Grid aims to be easier to work on and maintain, merging servers into a single unit, and taking advantage of modern infrastructure technologies like Docker and Kubernetes. It introduces a router, session queue, distributor, nodes, and a message bus, with the ability to run in standalone or traditional Hub and Node modes, and also supports a fully distributed mode for scalability. The new Grid also adopts Open Telemetry for observability and provides a GraphQL endpoint for more flexibility and querying specific areas of interest.

Switching from Selenium to Cypress, TestCafe or Playwright?` Organizations are adopting native JavaScript testing frameworks as part of their DevOps transformation, driven by the need for faster and more reliable testing. These frameworks, including Cypress, TestCafe, and Playwright, offer advantages such as tight browser integration, network mocking, and built-in waits, making them developer-friendly. While Selenium remains a widely adopted and robust test automation framework, native JavaScript frameworks are gaining popularity due to their ability to run within a browser and reduce flakiness. Sauce Labs supports all three frameworks via its saucectl CLI, providing scalable test automation solutions that can be leveraged with CI/CD tools and offer features such as preconfigured Docker images, VMs, and historical insights for easy debugging. Ultimately, the decision to switch from Selenium depends on testing needs, including browser support, automated testing priorities, and integration with CI/CD pipelines.