How Menlo Security Drove Improvements to their UI and User Experience with Sauce Labs

Menlo Security is a global operation providing advanced browser security and Secure Enterprise Browser solutions to millions of users, helping to prevent phishing and malware attacks on large enterprise brands like JP Morgan Chase and HSBC. With over 800 employees, including 36 dedicated QA Engineers spread across five development centers worldwide, Menlo Security empowers enterprises to communicate securely without compromise. 

Without Menlo Security, its customers' secure internet access would be at risk. Meaning, employees would not be able to send emails or share documents and do their daily jobs effectively. Which is why Menlo Security aims to ensure its product is always available and to deliver innovative software updates quickly without negatively impacting the end-user experience.

As Menlo Security’s business expanded, they needed a continuous quality solution that could be automated, required minimal maintenance, enabled rapid decision-making, and reduced time spent debugging. This was all in an effort to provide more frequent product updates without fear of releasing glitchy software that negatively impacts its end users.

Before Sauce Labs, Menlo Security was executing primarily manual brower tests and ran a small subset of automated tests, about 100 test cases, on a Selenium grid that was challenging to maintain. The existing process sometimes involved last-minute testing, often right before deployment, causing immense pressure on the QA team. “Testing usually happens at the tail end of development, around release time. So, QA feels the pressure to generate tests and results quickly – sometimes even overnight. It's stressful!” said Eli. 

Not only was test execution speed a challenge, but Menlo Security also struggled to control testing environments (e.g., browser version updates), keep up with numerous browser and OS versions, obtain test results efficiently and ensure consistent, seamless software updates without affecting the user experience. Much of their team’s time was spent maintaining internal Selenium grids, waiting for tests to complete and obtain results for effective decision making. Not to mention, a majority of the responsibility fell on quality assurance, causing a bottleneck in their release cycles. Menlo Security knew there was a better way to achieve high quality software releases at scale. 

Menlo Security turned to Sauce Labs Platform for Test to implement a continuous quality strategy, driven by automated testing. “The main driver behind test automation is the general need to deliver updates faster to our customer,” said Eli. 

After evaluating various vendors, Menlo Security partnered with Sauce Labs due to its mature product, scalability, security assurance, and robust professional support. With Sauce Labs, Menlo Security can automate manual testing processes, integrate test automation into their continuous integration environment, run tests in parallel to reduce execution time, test across real and virtual devices, operating systems, and browsers and leverage data for test improvements or decision making. 

In practice, Menlo Security aims to thoroughly test new features in their multi-tenant backend system. They do this with a series of short, functional tests that are more modular and targeted at specific features or experiences. By leveraging Sauce Insights debugging tools, Menlo Security can find issues and resolve them quickly, allowing teams to spend more time writing innovative code. 

Additionally, Sauce Labs enabled Menlo Security to test across the software development lifecycle and scale testing so that specialized QA testing resources are not always needed. Menlo Security integrated their testing infrastructure across the CI/CD so that development teams feel empowered to do testing earlier and often. And, when the newest version of their application launches, automated testing enables Menlo Security to, “fix forward fast,” said Eli. “With Sauce Labs, we can make changes and updates pretty quickly. If an issue arises, we can test it fast, fix it and deploy the next day. The next morning the problem disappears and everyone is happy.”

Menlo Security has now been using Sauce Labs for over ten years, scaling continuous quality as their business grows. Menlo Security maintains superb test coverage, with 96% pass rate. Since partnering with Sauce Labs, Menlo Security has achieved remarkable improvements:

Menlo Security leveraged Sauce Labs to implement a continuous quality solution, resulting in significant improvements to their user interface and overall user experience. They utilized structured tests, established a test automation framework, and leveraged data to improve their test strategy. As a result, UX and Dev teams at Menlo have been able to gradually adjust and redesign their initially clunky UI and create a better digital experience for their users. Highlighting their success, Menlo Security was named a Trailblazing Browser Security company by Cyber Defense Magazine, following the launch of the industry’s first complete Enterprise Browser solution.  

Learn more about Menlo Security’s Enterprise Browser here: https://www.menlosecurity.com/what-is/enterprise-browser