The latest installment of Hot Sauce Releases, our product roadmap webinar series, showcased the latest Sauce Labs products designed to enhance your testing efficiency, accelerate engineering velocity, and improve reliability. Leaders from across Sauce Labs unveiled the exciting future of our product strategy, complete with demos of Sauce Orchestrate, our hosted test orchestration tool; Sauce Visual, our new first-party visual testing solution; and comprehensive Crash Analytics Reporting for mobile and browser testing. We also introduced brand-new AI-powered test execution and data insights features.
Sauce Labs product strategy map
Here are the top ten takeaways from the event. You can also watch the replay of the webinar to see the demos and the live Q&A.
1. Prioritizing Software Quality is a Necessity, Not an Option
To kick off the session, Mike Donovan, SVP of Product Management at Sauce Labs, emphasized that software quality is the very foundation upon which businesses stand and shared the consequences of neglecting to prioritize quality code, which can lead to downtime. According to Gartner, a single hour of service disruption can cost $336,000 per hour, or $5,600 per minute.
With this, prioritizing software quality is no longer optional. It's a necessity to stay competitive, retain customer loyalty, and protect your revenue base. Successful Sauce Labs customers have found a solution to the quality challenge: embracing a continuous testing strategy. Further, quality is no longer the sole responsibility of QA teams; it is a shared commitment across various teams, including developers, QA, SDET, product, leadership, and production monitoring. This collaborative approach enhances efficiency, accelerates engineering velocity, and ultimately improves reliability.
2. Sauce Orchestrate: Accelerating Quality Software Releases
Next we featured Sauce Orchestrate, a tool that enables faster, more reliable test orchestration on web and mobile apps. This container-based execution environment is designed to run complete test suites within the Sauce Labs grid, offering several key benefits:
Optimize CI/CD by seamlessly integrating with leading CI tools in a user-friendly, 'server-less' environment.
Boost velocity and achieve a 70% faster test execution by eliminating network overhead.
Enhanced efficiency by reducing the cost burden by 34% and offloading test execution, resulting in more reliable performance.
3. Sauce Connect 5.0: A Leap in Security and Performance
The second highlight was Sauce Connect 5.0, the latest version of Sauce Labs secure proxy server. With Sauce Connect 5.0, customers can facilitate access to Sauce Labs infrastructure from local environments or behind corporate firewalls. This helps to ensure that companies' IT infrastructure is not exposed to security risks. Sauce Connect 5.0 sets new standards with its improved performance and enhanced security, namely:
5X improvement in performance, particularly when handling multiple sessions using the same instance.
Advanced Security by leveraging a non-proprietary HTTP/2 protocol with SOCKS5 proxy support.
The ability to seamlessly integrate into your CI/CD environments, making Sauce Connect 5.0 easy to use and compatible.
4. New OS and Device Support: Increase Coverage and Optimize the User Experience
Next, we unveiled new OS and device support on both real devices and emulators/simulators, including support for iOS 17 , Android 14, the iPhone 15 lineup and the Google Pixel 8 series. Additionally, Linux VM is now offered as the new default OS for cross-browser testing to enable faster testing. These enhancements provide numerous advantages including:
Optimized app experience: Ensure your app delivers a seamless experience for an expanding user base.
Increased test coverage: Cover a wider range of devices and OS versions to ensure peak performance and compatibility.
Reduced app risk: Test critical flows for the latest OS updates to reduce the risk of issues.
5. Sauce Visual: Visual Testing Made Easy
We announced the launch of the long awaited Sauce Visual, a tool that ensures consistency in your UI across all browsers and devices. This visual testing tool can be seamlessly incorporated into your build pipeline and offers the ability to test features faster with less complication.
With visual testing built into your pipeline, you can release features faster and with greater confidence. Additionally, at no additional cost customers can use Sauce Visual and integrate into Sauce Labs' infrastructure ensures that visual testing is simple and hassle-free.
6. Crash Insights: Enhanced Quality Assurance
Next, we discussed how Crash Insights and Reporting can help you swiftly capture, prioritize, and resolve pre-production crashes by identifying vulnerabilities in your pre-production quality checks to mitigate systemic app risks.
With one-click access to deeper analytics on pre-production crashes for real device tests, you can effectively prioritize and address crashes that matter, thanks to meaningful overviews and trends over time. Additionally, seamless integrations with tools like Jira and Slack enable faster collaboration and issue resolution. Check out this demo to learn how you can unlock the quality assurance superpower and boost observability, through a seamless integration of Sauce Error Reporting with our Real Device Cloud.
Learn more and sign up for the Crash Insights & Reporting Beta program
9. Usage Reporting: Harness Data-Driven Insights
Navigating the complex landscape of test data, performance metrics, and team productivity can be overwhelming. Sauce Labs offers a solution with Usage Reporting, which provides visual dashboards and reporting to help you understand your testing program's health and effectiveness. With Concurrency Usage Reporting, for VDC and soon RDC, you can gain valuable insights into simultaneous test runs, team activity, and trend data across various device types. This feature empowers you to make informed, real-time decisions based on data, enhancing your testing strategy, efficiency, and overall effectiveness. Keep an eye out for its release in Q4 of this year.
10. Embracing the Future of AI at Sauce Labs
The future of AI at Sauce Labs is promising. By running all of your tests and centralizing data on our platform, you can tap into the potential of Data, Insights, and AI features. In early 2024, two innovative AI-powered features, a data query tool, and test generation tool will be introduced.
The data query tool allows for real-time test trend analysis and usage data exploration using natural language queries, providing deep insights into your test data. Customers would no longer need to worry about manual data extraction and complicated dashboard building. Automatic, actionable test insights will be available with a single query search. The test generation tool will act as an assistant that simplifies automated test creation, tailored to your specific requirements. These features are set to significantly accelerate your automated testing efforts, so stay tuned for their release and potential beta opportunities.
Wrapping Up
We are thrilled to bring the Hot Sauce Releases webinar to you all and will continue to unveil exciting new features at Sauce Labs. With this latest installment, we shared the critical importance of software quality in today's tech landscape. In addition to the features covered above, we also highlighted the XCUITest support on simulators (beta) that now helps you streamline and scale iOS testing cost-effectively. By leveraging tools like Sauce Orchestrate, Sauce Connect 5.0, Sauce Visual, Crash Analytics and AI-powered testing tools, teams can embrace continuous testing and enhance efficiency, accelerate releases, and maintain a competitive edge in the fast-paced world of software development. Sauce Labs is your partner in software quality and our innovations will lead you down the path to more accessible and effective software solutions.
