As testing organizations continue to focus on becoming more agile and competitive, the phrase “shift-left” has grown predominant in the testing market. Shift-left means testing earlier in the development cycle rather than at the very end so that bugs can be detected and fixed sooner in the process.
While the concept of testing earlier during development is not new for most testers, changing testing practices has proven to be difficult. For example, organizations can implement a shift-left strategy by thinking about testing their applications at early stages of development. But the main challenge is how to do this.
Depending on what kind of applications your team is testing and what kind of solution you are looking for, using a lite compute level that provides a more bare bones testing environment could be the answer to helping your team adopt shift-left testing.
In 2020, Stack Overflow’s Developer Survey revealed 55% of professional developers were considering using Linux, making it even more popular than Windows. Since Sauce Labs has noticed that many of our customers do not have a specified OS for testing, we invested in Linux VMs that are lite and scalable for shift-left testing. The Linux VMs also provide our customers with the opportunity to test in headless mode as well.
Sauce Labs Linux VMs
With Sauce Labs new Linux VMs (generally available on June 1), you can test for Linux users and quickly validate on the latest Chrome or Firefox browsers. In fact, the data show that you can achieve a 20-30% performance improvement, and even greater strides in headless mode.
Important to note: if you run automated browser tests on newer Chrome or Firefox versions without a platform name specified, your tests will default to the new Linux VMs on June 21, 2023.
Testing in Headless Mode
You can test in headless mode using the headless arg that is built into webdriver options. Here are some examples for running Chrome browser test in headless mode:
Java example
1ChromeOptions browserOptions = new ChromeOptions(); //Use FirefoxOptions for Firefox2browserOptions.addArguments("--headless");
Python example
1options = ChromeOptions() #Use FirefoxOptions for Firefox2options.headless = True
