Like other high-performance teams behind the world’s most valuable web and mobile experiences, your organization is trying to take quality at speed to another level. You may be planning to massively scale test automation and parallel testing - which usually means developers doing more of their own testing (beyond unit testing) and a reduction (or elimination) of quality engineering.
Now, your dev team owns risk in production: an escaped defect may mean giving yourself a 3 a.m. call.
What if you could solve your quality at speed headaches by gaining more confidence that your tests were not flaky and you had done everything right to minimize the risk of escaped defects? Even if you don’t know everything about the use case, nothing in the age of AI-augmented testing should ever shake your release confidence.
But is the AI hype about automated testing with limitless scale and insights mature enough to be enterprise-ready? At Sauce Labs, we know the answer is 'yes'. Our co-founders created Selenium and Appium to transform quality at speed, and now, Sauce Labs offers the first continuous quality platform for enterprises with big, complex test suites.
In the following, learn how we are helping enterprises innovate with startup agility while handling complex security, efficiency and risk challenges.
DevOps speeds require flexible test infrastructure with unified quality management
Development teams know they are using an enterprise-ready platform when release confidence is always one insight, call, Zoom or Slack away. Sauce Labs powers this level of confidence by seamlessly unifying a continuous quality platform with on-demand engineering and customer success support.
Additionally, confidence comes from solving limited testing environments that can stagnate projects and threaten test stability, significantly impacting the developer experience with increased dev effort and low sprint scope (dev productivity) to ship on time. In worst cases, developers may ship without testing sufficiently or testing at all. Without centralized quality management to provision any mix of flexible test infrastructure (public or private real devices and emulators or simulators with ARM support), limited testing environments pose additional challenges including:
Limited Device Access - As mobile apps and responsive web design become normal, testing on real devices is critical. However, many teams only have access to a few physical devices for testing, if any at all. This makes it nearly impossible to test on the thousands of Android and iOS device types, sizes, and operating system versions in use today.
Inconsistent and Complex Test Environments - Some software testing tools and even local testing environments are difficult to configure and maintain. Different operating systems, browsers, and device types each require a specific setup, and keeping them all up to date is time-consuming. This often leads to inconsistencies that produce false test results.
Limited Geographic Coverage - When attempting to scale parallel testing, many teams struggle to test from different locations around the world, due to the limitations of the software testing tool in use (i.e., geolocation mocking). This prevents them from identifying issues that only appear in certain regions or on specific networks.
Long Test Cycles - Relying on physical devices and local test environments often means long testing cycles. Configuring environments, executing tests, and analyzing results can take days or even weeks. This delays releases and slows down development.
Inefficient CI/CD Pipelines - Managing the compute workloads of automated testing via CI/CD platforms is far less efficient and reliable than using an all-in-one quality management platform with flexible test orchestration capabilities to support a much wider range of use cases–and do so more efficiently.
Sauce Lab’s 5 Key Differentiators for Automated Web and Mobile App Testing
The Selenium and Appium projects revolutionized test execution by making parallel test execution highly scalable, reducing overall testing time for faster feedback and quicker releases. Sauce Labs builds on this capability by securely extending observability into production to power AI-augmented error reporting and failure pattern analysis. In this way, developers may find and fix problems easier with fast root cause analysis while development team leaders simplify continuous improvement by predicting and preventing errors. Now, teams can rethink regression and iteration efficiency.
Here are five innovative ways that Sauce Labs drives continuous quality for enterprises:
1. Choice of Public or Private Real Devices
Shipping mobile updates faster–whether to reduce UX friction or go to market faster than a competitor–is the #1 differentiator for most mobile apps. Over half of users will abandon an app for poor UX and/or performance. Sauce Labs helps you handle this risk by accelerating secure mobile testing with a dedicated pool of private devices that eliminate delays due to session acquisition, teardown, cleaning (as with public real devices), and team management tasks such as device allocation.
Additionally, private devices allow teams to customize setups with preserved settings, enabling devs to validate advanced mobile use cases ranging from Android Talkback to Apple Pay Support, MDM, cellular connectivity (deactivated WiFi), geolocation mocking and much more. Only Sauce Labs enables team leaders to easily provision workloads between public and private devices for optimal quality at speed and cost of quality.
2. Sauce Labs’ Mobile Emulators and Simulators Expand Test Coverage
Shift-left is a popular term in DevOps. In the Agile world, it’s a great methodology for performing tests earlier in the development lifecycle to identify issues before they hinder development. Spin up emulators and simulators before a device is even launched to the public or before an app has been built for early smoke and sanity testing. Remediating issues in the later stages of the SDLC is difficult and expensive.
Emulators and simulators are a way to stay one step ahead of potential disaster.
Sauce Labs’ emulators for Android and simulators for iOS supplement real device testing to get more coverage per test sprint – more bang for your buck – and minimize the risk of breaking changes, performance issues, and escaped defects. Only Sauce Labs enables teams to validate both INTEL and ARM architecture across real devices and simulators.
The benefits of Sauce Labs Emulators and Simulators include:
Better test coverage - Highly scalable and efficient, Sauce emulators and simulators can efficiently cover more scenarios in test sprints to ensure test stability and non-flakiness. Only Sauce Labs unifies real devices and emulators and simulators with centralized quality management, making it easy to know when, where and how to improve DORA metrics. .
Faster development cycles - When you can detect issues earlier, you can dedicate more time to improving the quality of your app and ultimately reduce build times leading to faster development cycles. With fast root-cause analysis and proactive remediation, Sauce Labs helps to ensure development cycles run fast, efficiently at any scale.
Better cost of quality - If your team is massively scaling parallel testing, control your cost of quality by moving workloads from real devices to emulators or simulators. Support both INTEL and ARM architecture for test cases requiring modern silicon.
3. Security, Compliance, and Accessibility
The Sauce Labs platform is certified and audited to meet the strictest regulations, including industry-leading compliance certifications such as SOC2/3, ISO 27701/27001, GDPR, and CCPA. We’re also KY3P compliant – a requirement by many global banking, financial services, and insurance companies of their vendors. Sauce Labs is enterprise-ready for teams that want a trusted partner to consolidate tools on a platform.
Sauce Labs commitment to security and corporate responsibility provides extra peace of mind that your sensitive information is protected. What does this look like in practice?
Network Isolation: Sauce Labs prevents unauthorized access to the network by ensuring that data communication within the platform remains secure, thus keeping your data safe from external threats. Think of Sauce Labs' cloud testing environment as a secure bubble around your tests, preventing unauthorized access and data breaches.
Data Encryption: Most testing tools offer VPN tunnels. Sauce Connect 5.0.1 is a high-availability and super efficient HTTP/2 tunnel that is robust enough to handle high volumes of parallel testing with minimal latency. Test behind the firewall at massive speed, scale and security.
Access Control/Authentication and Authorization: Sauce Labs has implemented a set of authorization policies such as MFA, and user lifecycle management, adding an extra layer of security beyond passwords. The access rights are provisioned according to need-to-know, need-to-have, or need-to-do principles. Regular access rights reviews are conducted, making it much harder for unauthorized access.
4. Enterprise Partnership in North America and Europe
What an enterprise partnership in North America and Europe ultimately means is an accelerated feedback loop between your needs and Sauce Labs, creating a more tailored experience.
Sauce Labs’ renowned commitment to enterprise partnership stands out with the following outcome-driven support and services:
Improve DORA Metrics: Sauce Labs holistically integrates the industry's most flexible and massively scalable test infrastructure with enterprise support and services to deliver custom solutions that help you transform testing into a competitive differentiator with faster innovation and minimized risk of escaped defects.
Optimize Test Strategies: Modernize your test strategy in partnership with Sauce Labs experts and services teams to handle the velocity and massive scale of regressions, mobile development, web accessibility compliance and much more. With Sauce Labs, make the most of AI-augmented testing with smarter, faster insights and more effective continuous improvement.
Optimize Cost of Quality at Scale: In a TEI study by Forrester, enterprises reported a 217% ROI or higher within six months after switching to Sauce Labs. With Sauce Labs, development and quality teams gain observability and AI-powered insights along with expert support and services to know the best ways to provision flexible test infrastructure for optimal coverage. Minimize the risk of bottlenecks, breaking changes, and escaped defects.
5. Breadth of Device, OS and Browser Combinations
Sauce Labs reigns supreme in software testing with its unmatched breadth of coverage. Forget juggling tools - Sauce Labs’ unified platform comprehensively and seamlessly integrates mobile emulators, simulators, and a Real Device Cloud (RDC), all on a single, unified platform.
Sauce Labs is often referred to as “the one-stop shop”, and here’s why:
Test Everything: Validate across a vast range of devices, browsers, and OS versions, ensuring a flawless user experience for everyone.
Support ARM: Test with cutting-edge features and upcoming software updates for a future-ready app.
Manage Quality: Achieve continuous quality throughout the SDLC with simplified management of all types of testing in the modern testing pyramid (web, mobile and mobile native apps). Optimize regression efficiency, automate accessibility compliance and orchestrate test workloads (via Docker containers) to accelerate remote test executions and manage centralized test environments for a wide range of use cases.
Optimize Any Framework: Bring any workload with any framework and programming language to massively scale parallel testing and concurrency with big, complex test suites; natively support Selenium, Playwright, Appium, Cypress, WDIO, Espresso and more frameworks
Why Switch to Sauce Labs?
Juggling disparate yet limited testing tools and environments is exhausting. We’re not exaggerating when we say we’re a one-stop automation shop with on-demand engineering and customer success support equipped to guide you through your journey to continuous quality. To recap:
Ability to choose between public and private devices
Mobile Emulators and Simulators for expanded test coverage
Certified and audited platform
Enterprise partnership in North America and Europe for a more tailored support experience
Unmatched breadth of coverage with seamless integration of mobile emulators, simulators, and a Real Device Cloud (RDC), all on a single, unified platform.
We’ll leave you with this: if you’re eating a sandwich, or a wrap of some sort, all your favorite ingredients need to be held together somehow and packaged securely to prevent anything from falling out. Think of continuous quality as your bread (or lettuce, if gluten-free); private devices as your protein; mobile emulators and simulators as your veggie of choice; breadth of coverage as your utensils and security and compliance as everything in between.
