In today's retail marketplace, digital channels hold a prominent and often central position. Modern software practices emphasize the need for rapid development and deployment. The retail world is no exception to this need for speed. To match the pace of innovation, continuous testing throughout the software development life cycle is the best way to build digital confidence and provide a great user experience.
Employees today are more mobile than ever. As we saw, due to COVID-19 the majority of organizations moved their employees to a work from home model overnight. This quick change of location forced businesses to implement solutions that would provide their workforces secure remote access to an increasingly complex corporate network.
At Sauce Labs, we define Continuous Testing as a “best practice approach to software quality that involves testing earlier and more often throughout the development lifecycle.” Teams that adopt continuous testing realize a number of benefits, including fewer bugs found in production, faster release cycles, and overall improved customer experience. Another rarely discussed benefit is that as the number of quality checkpoints increases, so does the volume of test data and quality signals.
Earlier this year, Sauce Labs announced the release of our newest product to expand developer-first capabilities: Sauce Testrunner Toolkit. Currently in a free beta, it makes setting up, writing, and running web tests easier and faster for developers during early pipeline testing. This is the first in a number of updates to our platform that empower developers with the tools they need to achieve quality at scale.
So you’ve realized the benefits of test automation. Through your own research, or perhaps a small proof of concept, you’ve realized removing once-manual quality processes can accelerate release cycles and improve your user experience. You’ve built a small suite of tests, and the benefits are real. The next step in your journey, you realize, is to achieve the real value of automation, which means running it continuously and at scale.
All good things need to come to an end. In this case, that’s true of the Sauce Sample Test Frameworks GitHub organization. While these sample frameworks are now gone, they’re not forgotten. In fact, we’ve replaced them with something better. In the past, this organization provided barebones examples of connecting to Sauce Labs with sample frameworks in a large variety of languages and tools. These frameworks were mainly based on Selenium and testing a basic web page.
In today’s online world, every digital experience is a reflection of your brand—which is why mobile application testing should be at the forefront of your testing strategy. Whether it’s a picture of a check, a selfie, or a QR code, images can be uploaded to mobile apps for many reasons. Behind the scenes, the application has to do some amount of processing and storage.
Digital confidence, the feeling that everyone in your organization expects your application to work exactly as it was designed, is a journey that requires a number of strategic and tactical considerations. From cultural buy-in from the top to tooling and resources that help support continuous testing at scale, there are a number of things that can help build confidence that your applications are providing flawless user experiences.
Over the years software tools, testing frameworks, and development practices have evolved to meet new challenges. This shift means testing is happening earlier in the software development lifecycle with developers increasingly taking on more responsibility for testing with a focus on speed. That’s why we’re excited to announce the expansion of our developer-first test capabilities.
A little more than a year ago today, aiming to address what we saw as a significant gap in the testing market, we first launched the Sauce Labs Continuous Testing Benchmark, a new report organizations could use to see how their continuous testing efforts stacked up against both critical best practices and the testing efforts of other enterprises.
