Sauce Labs has added additional debugging and analytics capabilities to its testing platform to make it easier to manage continuous testing across multiple application development projects.
Lubos Parobek, vice president of product at Sauce Labs, said DevOps teams need to prioritize which bugs to address first across multiple development projects occurring simultaneously. In fact, according to the latest annual survey of 1,091 technology professionals conducted by Dimensional Research on behalf of Sauce Labs, DevOps teams on average are now taking longer to address bugs. These days there are many more issues that require debugging across multiple development projects, which is overwhelming DevOps teams, who must then prioritize some debugging requirements over others.
Specifically, the survey found only 21 percent of respondents report they fix bugs immediately, down from 23 percent in 2017.
Analytics capabilities included in Sauce Labs’ rechristened Continuous Testing Cloud include the ability to view test results by browser and operating system, visibility into pass/fail and error trends and the ability to see how a single test behaves over time so DevOps teams can more easily identify tests inconsistent with overall test run time and pass/fail rates.
Scheduled to be available in the second quarter, the Continuous Testing Cloud makes it possible to more easily reconcile advances in the rate at which applications are being developed and constrained testing and debugging tools, Parobek said.
The Sauce Labs survey results also show progress being made in the realm of mobile application testing. A full 77 percent of respondents said they now use a mix of both real devices and simulators or emulators for mobile testing, up from 34 percent in 2015. That approach results in higher fidelity to the actual experience of an end user on each device, said Parobek.
That shift, however, may also explain why there is more manual testing. More than half (56 percent) said they do as much or more automated as manual testing, a minor decrease from 59 percent (2017) and 60 percent (2016), the report found. Just under half (45 percent) said they do, however, expect to increase spending on test automation in 2018.
Parobek said organizations are moving into what he describes as the third era of testing. The first two eras were manual testing followed by a shift to automated testing. The third era is marked by continuous testing that leverages automation to make it possible to test code as it’s being developed rather than after, when the application is complete.
Naturally, each organization is not as far down the path toward continuous testing as every other. Parobek said for the most part, early adopters of DevOps practices employ continuous testing more widely than traditional enterprise IT organizations that are still in the early stages of embracing DevOps. The good news is the latter have an opportunity to leverage a much larger body of DevOps best practices than the organizations that originally pioneered the concepts.
— Mike Vizard
