February 2022 Summaries

Fixing mobile software errors is a collaborative effort that often involves identifying and resolving issues throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Traditional tools can struggle to capture accurate information about errors, leading to longer times to detect and resolve problems. However, with the introduction of Backtrace, a mobile crash and error reporting solution, companies can cut their time to detection and resolution in half. By providing best-in-class error capture, prioritization, and resolution flows, Backtrace helps developers identify root causes, create patches, and ensure timely fixes. The solution integrates seamlessly with existing tools, such as Jira, and offers advanced features like call stack analysis, regression detection, and powerful analytics. This enables teams to ship high-quality mobile apps faster, improve customer satisfaction, and reduce the time spent on error resolution from 14 days to just 7 days on average.

Automated testing is a crucial aspect of software development that helps ensure the highest quality of software applications by covering a wide scope of application features and possible situations. It can help achieve goals such as meeting functional and business requirements, working efficiently, and fitting well into existing architecture. To get started with automated testing, one must first narrow down goals to something measurable, prioritize them through risk analysis, and define the roles and responsibilities of team members. Then, create a testing scenario and test cases that describe the functionality of the application in detail, including reusability and data-driven testing. Next, select a suitable testing framework, build and run automated tests, and execute them in the cloud for scalability. The benefits of automated testing include faster execution times, reduced costs, improved quality, and increased coverage of various testing scenarios. By approaching software testing systematically and using a testing automation platform, developers can speed up the development cycle and bring their software to market earlier.

Sauce Labs has appointed Martha Jensen as its new Chief People Officer, bringing her expertise in HR operations and people strategy from her previous roles at Ivalua and Facebook. The company has also added Tatyana Mamut to its board of directors, a transformational leader with experience driving product innovation and customer engagement at top tech companies like Amazon and Salesforce. These appointments reflect Sauce Labs' commitment to creating a work environment that values health, inclusion, and empowerment, and demonstrate the company's dedication to attracting and retaining top talent from around the world.

SauceCon '22 is a virtual conference for software development and testing that will take place on May 3-5, 2022. The event aims to bring together the global community of Sauce Labs users, test automation experts, open source enthusiasts, engineers, mobile developers, QA and DevOps leaders, and many others to share innovative ways to deliver quality software at scale. The conference features a wide range of topics including test automation, mobile testing and development, digital accessibility, API testing, CI/CD and DevOps. For the first time ever, SauceCon will be available for free to make it more accessible and inclusive. The event also includes hands-on workshops, and a call for presentations is now open until March 14, 2022, inviting anyone with great automated testing, mobile app testing, continuous testing, and DevOps stories and experiences to submit a talk.

Announcing the Sauce Labs App for Sumo LogicSauce Labs is excited to announce a new integration with Sumo Logic, the Sauce Labs App! We first announced our partnership with Sumo Logic last year, and are now pleased to share the news of this integration, one that delivers standardized charts and tables to provide an overview of how certain tests and applications are running. With this integration you can track test passes and failures, measure and manage quality metrics over time, and get a holistic view of your engineering practice. Pushing your data from Sauce Labs to Sumo Logic will give you access to dashboards that provide an overview of your QA testing in a single view. You can track the number of passed and failed tests against all of the different OS and browser configurations under test to understand how your team’s tests are performing, all in one place. Measuring and managing quality metrics over time is an important benefit to highlight because by storing and analyzing longer-term time-series analytics tied to your software testing practice, you’ll gain insights into how effective your development team is at producing high-quality code that is ready for production. Identifying the gaps in the engineering practice allows you and your organization to improve the process for creating higher quality code at speed.Putting this integration into place can help you and your team achieve the goal of delivering digital confidence to your users - and the data and insights you will derive from this integration can help drive the creation of a more efficient engineering practice. Learn more about the Sauce Labs App on the Sumo Logic website.`` This summary covers the announcement of a new integration between Sauce Labs and Sumo Logic, which provides an overview of how certain tests and applications are running through standardized charts and tables. The integration allows users to track test passes and failures, measure and manage quality metrics over time, and gain insights into their engineering practice. It also enables teams to identify gaps in their process and improve the creation of high-quality code at speed. Ultimately, this integration aims to help teams achieve digital confidence by providing a single view of QA testing and driving the creation of more efficient engineering practices.

Parallelization in testing allows for multiple automated test scripts to run simultaneously against various environment configurations, increasing the speed of test results and allowing for more frequent testing, increased test coverage, better and more consistent results. To achieve effective parallelization, it's essential to use the right infrastructure, write test scripts that are atomic, autonomous, and short, and remove data dependencies to ensure tests can run independently. By deploying parallelization thoughtfully and effectively, developers can enhance the overall health of their CI/CD pipeline and return better, more consistent results.

Sauce Labs has achieved both ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 certification for its entire portfolio of products, demonstrating a commitment to protecting customer data and delivering high-quality software with the highest level of security available. These certifications provide customers with confidence that their data is secure in any Sauce Labs test environment, and reflect the company's dedication to accelerating the release of high-quality software while prioritizing digital safety and security. The achievements are based on rigorous independent audits that ensure comprehensive security controls and policies, making them a significant milestone for the company's ongoing efforts to provide customers with digital confidence.

Low-code test automation is a software development approach that simplifies application testing by removing most manual coding from the process, allowing non-technical users like product managers and business analysts to participate in the testing process. This enables organizations to scale their development teams quickly, address the issue of "test debt" where failed tests cause additional work, and reduce costs by 25% to 75%. Low-code test automation tools cut down on labor costs, improve employee productivity, and provide a more efficient way to manage test debt. It's becoming an essential aspect of testing that should be included in every product team's arsenal, enabling a culture of quality across the organization.

Evinced's modern accessibility solutions automatically detect critical issues that legacy tools miss, using computer vision and advanced algorithms to analyze web and mobile pages as a sighted user would. The solution can be easily implemented with just 3-5 lines of code, reducing friction and time spent on setting up new tools. It provides comprehensive coverage across major platforms, including thousands of browser, operating system, and mobile device combinations through Sauce Labs' cloud-based device pool. Evinced's automation SDKs facilitate running tests in parallel, removing testing as a bottleneck, while generating clear, actionable reports with highlighted screenshots, WCAG success criteria, and suggested fixes. This solution meets the key requirements for shifting accessibility testing left, making it an enterprise-ready solution for modern development teams.

The current alignment between CIOs, CTOs, devs, and QA teams is imperfect but has progressed significantly from previous years. Today's CIOs understand the importance of quality, speed, and software testing in providing flawless customer experiences across platforms. However, there are still gaps in understanding between what CIOs know and what testers want them to know. Achieving 100% test automation coverage is not possible due to code complexity and unimportance, and instead, a risk-based approach should be used. Test automation complements human testers by freeing them to focus on user experience and ensuring seamless interactions. The role of a tester goes beyond finding bugs to modeling and advocating for a great user experience. A comprehensive testing strategy that spans multiple types of tests is necessary, with Selenium being just one tool among many. Ultimately, quality is an everyone's responsibility, requiring testers to understand customer needs and business drivers to deliver high-quality software experiences.