The proliferation of mobile devices and the rise of online stores are not only changing the way people do business but also redefining the software development industry. As the modern world becomes increasingly digital, consumers expect applications to be delivered quickly and updated constantly while delivering flawless, simple, yet highly intuitive user experience.
To address these needs and meet customer expectations, Sauce Labs, provider of the world’s largest continuous testing cloud for web and mobile applications, is bringing solutions that enable software development teams to design and develop high-quality applications faster and more efficiently.
SourceForge caught up with Lubos Parobek, the Vice President of Products at Sauce Labs, to talk about how digital transformation is reshaping software development and testing. Parobek also shares his predictions in the software development and testing space and highlights the benefits of using the Sauce Labs Continuous Testing Solution to achieve digital excellence.
Q: Who are Sauce Labs’ customers? What pain points does your solution seek to solve?
Lubos Parobek, the Vice President of Products at Sauce Labs
A: Let me first touch on what’s driving companies to work with Sauce Labs from a top-level business perspective. The common thread among all of our customers is a desire to be one of the world’s leading digital brands. Companies that turn to Sauce Labs do so because they’ve realized their success as a business is largely defined by their ability to deliver apps quickly and provide customers a flawless digital experience. In a sense, that is both their goal and their pain point. They know where they want to go, and now they’re looking for ways to accelerate the journey.
From an end-user standpoint, we engage directly with development teams tasked with building those web and mobile applications and delivering that flawless customer experience. These teams know they have to move faster and deliver applications more quickly, and while they’ve taken a great first step to toward doing that with the shift to agile methodologies, testing really hasn’t kept pace, and can often be a critical bottleneck. That’s where Sauce Labs can really help transform their business. Our continuous testing cloud removes testing as a bottleneck, and makes it fast, reliable and easy throughout the software development process, enabling developers to deliver flawless applications to market, and do so quickly.
Q: Please tell us a brief overview of Sauce Labs. Where, when, and how did the company get its start? Who are the brains behind Sauce Labs?
A: Sauce Labs was founded in San Francisco in 2008 by Steven Hazel, who remains with the company today as our principal architect, John Dunham, and Jason Huggins. Jason is also the inventor of Selenium and co-founder of Appium. They founded the company on the belief that testing should not be a bottleneck for developers, but rather a resource they can leverage to write better code and deliver better applications.
I think what’s especially unique about Sauce Labs is the vision it required from our founders. At a time when both cloud and open source were in nascent stages, and testing was largely an afterthought, they developed a cloud-based testing platform designed to support an open source framework. It seems obvious today, when testing has become mission-critical, cloud has become a delivery platform of choice, and developers around the world are leveraging open source frameworks, but it took a tremendous amount of vision for them to see this day coming.
Q: Can you discuss the difference between digital transformation and digital excellence?
A: When we talk about digital transformation, we’re talking about the explosion of mobile devices, the mass movement of customer transactions from brick-and-mortar stores to web and mobile applications, and the enormous shift from waterfall-based development methodologies to agile methodologies. Except for some late adopter organizations that are still catching up, much of this transformation has already happened.
Digital excellence, or perhaps better said, the pursuit of digital excellence, is what comes next. You’ve made significant investments to drive more business via your web and mobile apps. You’ve moved to agile development. You have, in essence, transformed. Now you need to shift gears and focus on making the kind of continuous, realistic improvements that enable you to deliver new digital experiences to market quickly and truly delight your customers. Your goal is no longer transformation but excellence.
Q: How have consumer expectations changed in the era of digital-everything? And how have those shifting expectations changed the way companies have to approach software development?
A: If you go back not all that long ago, consumers were usually willing to trade some degree of speed for quality, or some degree of quality for speed. As the world became increasingly digital, however, those expectations shifted, and willingness to compromise has largely disappeared. Consumers expect applications to be delivered quickly and updated constantly, and at the same time, they expect a flawless and highly intuitive user experience.
So, what does this mean for software development? Simply put, it means we have to deliver both quality and speed. Speed to market is a differentiator for many consumers, so we have to take advantage of market opportunities when and where they present themselves. At the same time, we can’t compromise on quality. Being first to market means nothing if you get there with an app that has bugs, performance issues, or is not visually compelling.
Q: What are some of the technical best practices organizations should implement in order to achieve digital excellence?
A: The first is less a technical best practice than it is a philosophical one, and that’s to thoughtfully balance your development resources between web and mobile applications. Many organizations still have the mindset that web applications come first, but I suspect it won’t be long before mobile apps become the primary source of most consumer transactions. Digitally excellent organizations are preparing accordingly.
The biggest thing you can do from a technical standpoint is to implement continuous testing. Continuous testing enables developers to uncover bugs the moment they’re written into code, and address them quickly. This keeps the delivery pipeline moving, and eliminates the delays that occur when issues are discovered at the end of the release cycle. If you can do those two things, you can release apps quickly and with confidence.
Finally, I think you have to look at automation. The more aspects of your delivery pipeline you can automate, the easier it becomes to achieve digital excellence. Take testing, for example. Automated testing largely eliminates the need for human intervention in the testing process (other than writing the test script to begin with), and in doing so, delivers a level of scale and reliability you just can’t achieve running tests manually.
Q: As the provider of the world’s largest continuous testing cloud for web and mobile applications, what do you think are the keys to effective continuous testing?
A: Organizations that are successful with continuous testing share a number of common characteristics. First, they’ve made a company-wide commitment to quality. Testing is the domain of the development team, but everyone in the company, especially those in top leadership positions, understands the importance of quality.
Second, they’ve put the right infrastructure in place. This is where I’m a strong proponent of leveraging cloud infrastructure. Doing so ensures you have the scale you need to run tests in parallel, and makes it infinitely easier for you to keep up with the ever-expanding combination of browsers, operating systems, and mobile platforms against which you need to test.
And third, they’ve made shifting left a priority. The idea behind shift-left testing is to run tests as early in the development process as possible. We’re always encouraging customers to shift as far left as possible with both functional and non-functional tests. The earlier in the delivery pipeline you start testing, the more likely you are to succeed.
Q: Tell us more about Sauce Lab’s Continuous Testing Solution. What are the core features and capabilities that make it stand out from other solutions available in the market?
A: This is one I could spend all day answering, so I’ll try to reign myself in! The first thing that stands out is the sheer breadth and depth of coverage the Sauce Labs Continuous Testing Cloud provides. We enable customers to test on more than 900 browser/OS combinations, more than 200 mobile emulators and simulators, and more than 2,000 real devices.
Then there’s the simplicity factor. Setting up and maintaining the infrastructure needed to test across that many browsers, operating systems and mobile devices is a daunting proposition for even the most digitally mature companies. Using our cloud platform eliminates all of those headaches. Instead of spending time managing infrastructure, we enable development teams to do what they do best (and what delivers the most value to the business), and that’s writing and testing code.
The last thing I’d point to is our ongoing legacy of leadership within the open source community. We were founded by the inventor of first Selenium and then Appium, and we’re still the largest contributor to the Selenium project today. Our platform is built specifically to support open source automated testing standards, and we deliver comprehensive integrations with all major CI/CD platform servers.
Our connectivity to and involvement in the broader open source testing community really is second to none.
I could keep going, but I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves. We now have more than 650 enterprise customers, and well over 2 billion tests have now been run on our continuous testing cloud. You don’t reach those kinds of milestones without delivering the combination of speed, quality, and efficiency that customers need.
Q: In what can Sauce Labs empower software development teams and help organizations drive business growth with their digital experiences? Can you provide us with sample use cases?
A: One of my favorite examples is Walmart. When you think of Walmart, you probably think of a traditional brick-and-mortar retailer, but they have an entire division called Walmart Labs that is dedicated to driving a market-leading digital strategy. As they worked to ramp developer productivity and improve the quality of their customers’ e-commerce experiences, they realized they needed to move away from legacy manual testing and embrace test automation. So they built their own open source quality automation platform and began using it in conjunction with the Sauce Labs Continuous Testing Cloud.
The results tell you all you need to know about the power of automated testing. They’re now running about 50,000 test per day across more than 700 browser/OS combinations, 172 device emulators and over 300 unique real devices. And because they no longer have to manage infrastructure internally or run tests manually, they’ve saved more than 750,000 team hours that can be repurposed to drive developer productivity. The end result is acceleration of their deployment cycles from twice per month to multiple times daily. That’s how you become a digital leader.
Q: Looking ahead, what trends, market movements, and technologies do you think will likely shape the future of software testing and development? And how is Sauce Labs meeting these head-on?
A: From a macro-level standpoint, it’s clear that testing and development of mobile apps will continue to take off. Again, it’s not hard to envision a day when the volume of transactions consumers initiate via mobile apps exceeds those initiated via web apps. We’re entering the era of mobile-first, and that’s going to directly impact the investment in mobile app testing and development.
From a technical standpoint, I’d again point to the concept of shifting left. This is something that I think becomes ubiquitous pretty quickly. The value of testing earlier and more often in the development cycle is too great for companies to ignore.
And lastly, I think we’ll continue to see a proliferation of open source testing frameworks. We’re already seeing it with increased interest in frameworks such as Cyress, Detox, Puppeteer and Earl Grey, and as developers continue to write more mobile tests, we’ll see rising interest in new developer focused-frameworks as well.
One of the things we pride ourselves on at Sauce Labs is being ahead of the trend curve and ready with solutions as soon as customers need them. On the mobile front, we recently delivered advanced support for iOS and Android Native test automation frameworks, and to facilitate efforts to shift left, we recently unveiled Sauce Headless, a first-of-its-kind solution that provides cloud-based headless browser testing on containers and that we expect to be available in April. It really is an exciting time for testing and for Sauce Labs.
About Sauce Labs
Sauce Labs ensures the world’s leading apps and websites work flawlessly on every browser, OS and device. Its award-winning Continuous Testing Cloud provides development and quality teams with instant access to the test coverage, scalability, and analytics they need to deliver a flawless digital experience. Sauce Labs is a privately held company funded by Toba Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Centerview Capital Technology, IVP and Adams Street Partners.