Secret Sauce

This afternoon I attended Complete Your QA Strategy with Manual Testing, a webinar and demo by Yi Min Yang & Alistair Heys, hosted by the Test Tribe.

The speakers are both from Saucelabs and, at least from where I was sitting, the content of the presentation was either relatively generic or pitching the Saucelabs product line and in neither case much about test strategy.

Unsurprising, but I am interested to see and hear how vendors talk about their offerings and, in this case, the highlight was a statistic that over 90% of Sourcelab's top 500 customers use the platform as a way to fire up enviroments for hands-on testing as well as for automation, despite Saucelabs being known for the latter.

Much more engaging was the brief demo which showed how quick and easy it can be to configure a virtual machine with pretty much any major OS and browser, choosing from a large range of versions for each. For remote pairing purposes, it's possible to invite others to join the interactive session on the VM.

Saucelabs also offer virtual and physical Android and iOS devices. A second thread in the demo showed interactions with a couple of real phones sitting in a data centre somewhere in Germany. Again, simple configuration allowed a variety of devices and mobile OSes to be selected and tooling around the devices allowed for location to be spoofed, data to be injected into the camera, the app under test to be up- and down-graded live, and low-level device logs to be extracted.

Of course, demos are not the real world and this demo ran for just ten minutes inside a Saucelabs sandbox and I have little experience with these kinds of services but, in all honesty, I was impressed by what I saw and the possibilities it presents.

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