Device Farms: BrowserStack and SauceLabs Integration

Device Farms: BrowserStack and SauceLabs Integration

An innovative app idea and developing it efficiently alone will not assure the app’s success. Testing the developed app is an integral part of the entire process to ensure that there is no discrepancy from the expected result and offers a great user experience. The main challenge that lies ahead of testing the app is to check if its experience across all devices, networks, operating systems, browsers, or any combination is seamless. With about more than 300 million digital devices, testing them across all of them becomes extremely difficult. Hence, ‘device farm’ is the best alternative that provides access to all the devices, platforms, browsers, etc on Cloud; thereby, streamlining the process, offering high scalability, and reducing the cost tremendously.

‘Device Farms’ are either in-built or purchased from a third-party provider. The popular device farms available today are BrowserStack and SauceLabs. Tenjin Online is pre-integrated with these two device farms to give access to a wide range of devices, browsers, and platforms to the tester and ensure the app works fine across all of them.

Let us understand what features they have to offer, how are they different from each other, and which one to choose.

What are the benefits of incorporating device farms?

Device farms are integrated for testing apps across different platforms, browsers, and devices. It contributes to creating top-quality apps by giving access to a wide range of platforms to test the app. This approach helps test apps across different devices, decrease cross-platform errors, reduce time, and create quality apps.

Here are some of the advantages of device farms:

• It helps increase platform testing coverage by giving access to a wide range of devices
• It reduces the cost of investment that goes into buying physical devices
• Reduces infrastructural and management cost
• Offers seamless integration across CI/CD pipeline
• Access from anywhere, anytime
• Helps test the app’s operability
• Offers elaborate reporting
• It is a cost-effective alternative
• Provides higher scalability for tests

Significance of BrowserStack and SauceLabs Integration

The emergence of advanced moves to create device farms eased the process of testing apps on real devices and browsers. It provides access to all platforms, browsers, and devices in a Cloud-hosted testing environment. It is the most affordable, simple, and easy option to consider for improving the app’s usability across devices.

BrowserStack and SauceLabs are two high-end players in device farms offering seamless integration to any testing tools and providing access to a wide range of platforms on the Cloud. They are more or less similar and gained immense popularity for the ease they offer. SauceLabs have over 4,000 customers while BrowserStack has about 50, 000 customers, who have benefited immensely from the integration.

Some of the significant features of BrowserStack and SauceLabs are:

• Enables web and mobile app testing
• Access to a wide range of mobile devices, browsers, platforms, and operating systems
• New and older versions of browsers and operating systems
• Debugging and logging options
• Reporting bugs
• Tunnelling feature for local testing
• App logs and network logs for native app testing
• JIRA and GitHub integration for defect management
• Sharing analytics for the executed tests
• Console logs, network logs, and debugging options
• Testing app from different locations with the GPS option
• Testing app under different network conditions like Wi-Fi, 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G

These are some of the generic features, let us under BrowserStack’s and SauceLabs’ individual capabilities

BrowserStack

BrowserStack is a popular device farm preferred by organizations in their test automation journey. On integration, it provides instant access to 1000+ real devices and browsers for testing, helping you get over the outdated labs with virtual machines.

Unique features of BrowserStack

• Access to real device Cloud, helping test app on a wide range of Android and iOS devices for accurate results.
• Access to 1000+ desktop browsers with the latest versions. Some popular browsers are Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, and Safari among others.
• Advanced test dev environments
• Easy testing without setup or configuration

SauceLabs

SauceLabs is another popular word that is creating buzz. This device farm allows testing web and mobile apps easily by providing access to 700+ browsers, devices, and operating systems. This Cloud-based platform doesn’t require any infrastructural setup and performs mobile and web app testing instantly on various combinations of devices, browsers, and operating systems.

Unique features of SauceLabs

• 700+ browsers, devices, and operating systems
• Cloud-based automated testing platform
• Secure and CI-ready
• Videos and screenshots for easy debugging
• Easy cross-browser testing
• On-demand cloud for enterprise-grade scalability
• Optimized for popular testing frameworks

Conclusion

With the above article, it is clear that device farm integration is essential to improve testing efficiency, reduce time, and eliminate the challenges of app usability and compatibility. Both, BrowserStack and SauceLabs are popular device farms used by organizations for the wider range of features they offer. The benefits offered by BrowserStack and SauceLabs make them an ideal choice of device farm by Tenjin Online. Tenjin Online is a powerful test automation solution that helps users to integrate third-party software of their choice. Integrations like BrowserStack and SauceLabs reshape the workflow by bringing the team together, working on common test/defect management tools, and making the process more robust and resilient. Try Tenjin Online for free – https://signup.tenjinonline.com/createaccount