Towards the beginning of this year, we had to constantly switch between Sauce Labs and their legacy solution for real device testing, TestObject. This was causing a lot of issues or confusion for our engineers & clients. Now, with the new unified platform, we get everything we need in one single place and it is so intuitive and straightforward. You can easily do manual testing, view running automation scripts or switch between data centers from one single place.
For example, the way the menus scroll could be improved because it does not have a bar, the way that people are used to, where you can move up and down. It is something that you have to flick in order to activate. The most valuable feature for us is the browser. That is all we’re using right now, although come to the start of the year, we will be using the mobile feature.
Saucy Selenium
Some of the support team members are better than others. Overall, I would rate the support between six and seven out of ten. We run our testing on a daily basis and I don’t think we’ve run into any stability issues. Nothing that I am aware of has been a concern. For some of the features we aren’t using yet, I believe we do need to add new licenses, but for others, we just need to try them out.
- The ticket goes to the L1 support team first, and if they have the solution, they provide us with that.
- We just spin it up, specify the version we need, and we’re done.
- We did a full pilot where Sauce Labs gave us an area to access the mobile environment, and we ran our use cases before selecting the software.
- With Sauce Labs, you can also run tests on various operating system and browser combinations in parallel, reducing the amount of time to get results.
- They support Selenium 4 as well as several other test frameworks, such as Cypress, XCUITest, Puppeteer, and Espresso.
- Part of our job at Applause is to enhance the overall testing process of our clients & automate it as much as possible.
There is an ROI, and we see customers renewing their license for the second year to use Sauce Labs for their solutions. BrowserStack is a leading software testing platform for developers to comprehensively test their websites and mobile applications across 2,000+ real browsers and devices in a single cloud platform—and at scale. The increasing complexity of mobile app development requires a fast, scalable, and https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ reliable mobile testing solution from development to post-release. Also, latency, due to Sauce Labs being a cloud-based solution, has been a concern. We work in different continents and countries, but last time I checked, Sauce Labs was only offering two data centers, one in the EU and another in the US. If you’re not in either of those two places, you would have latency and issues running your test scripts.
Tools & Services
But Sauce Labs runs the gamut and they have all kinds of devices. You’ll run out of combinations that are relevant to you before you run every single combination that Sauce Labs has. Sometimes, my customers find a way to go to Sauce Lab support directly, and either they are unable to communicate to Sauce Labs support what their issue is or Sauce Labs is not able to understand them. Usually, my team plays that middleman and we can facilitate pretty well, providing context to any potential problems or issues within the company as well.
If you keep on scaling it on a larger scale, the application that you’re trying to automate should also support that, but it’s scalable. I used to run 100 scripts for a project on Sauce Labs, and it used to give me results in four hours without any major failures or a 96% to 98% pass rate. There were one or two things, such as the iCloud pop-up on the iPhones, that were causing issues. I also faced an issue where during the execution time, the iCloud password used to expire within a certain period, which used to create pop-ups on the screen making our tests fail. If that can be improved, it will be very helpful. Once we sign up with them, they quickly raise a ticket for any issue, and they address that within 24 to 48 hours.
Professional services
Even if I was storing that data, I wouldn’t store something that long. But there are also teams that come to me and say, “We need something we ran four hours ago.” So there is a use to that data retention that Sauce Labs provides. As long as it doesn’t literally go below a week or above 48 years—anything within that range—is enough. Whether it’s 30 or 50 days wouldn’t matter to me.
And so you can do all of that through this configuration files and then the hub will determine where you want the automated tests to run. I believe that JSON format that you can use to configure the hub. And so all you can do the source code itself. We don’t have to worry about making sure the devices are healthy or .
Sauce Labs with Jenkins
They make it available to us and then we do the training for the end-users. We have a registration list of about a thousand people, to which we have provided demos and documentation. It’s a combination of self-service education for the testers and developers in training. Sauce Labs is a cloud-based solution, so in terms of latency, when the application is hosted on a server at a different location, we have noticed a latency. The execution time reduces from 8 hours to 2 or 3 hours based on the parallel instances procured from Sauce Labs.
We had to do a comparative analysis that included breaking down all of the different features and comparing them against those other tools, to make sure they satisfied the features and functionalities we needed. Not having that knowledge across those vendors completely, we were able to do that through a pilot. Essentially, we came away with knowing the nitty-gritty by running the pilot and doing the feature analysis. As such, we were able to make sure that Sauce Labs met our needs. Our implementation strategy was pretty straightforward.
The Sauce Test Toolchain
However, having more availability and looking into different strategies for making things faster are important. Our goal is always to get faster feedback on a build, which means if it takes a long time to run an automation suite then it’s less likely that we’ll use it. We’re always seeking ways to add capabilities and expedite things. While Sauce Labs pretty much covers everything we need, another exception is HarmonyOS.
The learning curve for newcomers would also be easier, because they wouldn’t need to worry about figuring out which data center to run against. Their platform also offers some cool features if you’re working with apps. You can just pass them a URL to an app build that is stored somewhere on your servers or on AWS, and they will install that on the phone/tablet and run tests against it on the spot. This has allowed for an easier integration with our SDK, as opposed to competitors who don’t offer such feature. Sauce Labs is what enables our different testing combinations.
Why our customers love Sauce Labs
When some of the users tried to log in, it was slow for them or we didn’t have enough licenses. That was during the core development What is Sauce Labs before we even launched. The Failure Analysis feature is really important for us, one of the most important aspects.