Sauce Labs Pros and Cons

Live device testing. As we all know, It's really hard and challenging to find/purchase many real devices to test because it will be costly and not all the team can be able to purchase all of the devices out there. We used to have a lot of real devices under our labs. However, it is really time-consuming to maintain those devices and make sure they are up to date with the testing requirements.

I have found the live test section with Sauce Labs to be extremely valuable. When you can't quite figure out why a test is failing, you can go to the live test results section within their tool and launch your test (specifying a given OS/browser, or device) manually and step through the test to see the issue more clearly, usually opening up the developer's tool console and watching the network calls and console (within Chrome) to usually find the underlying issue.

Supplying devices to a testing team of possibly close to one thousand testers and developers is a great undertaking but Sauce Labs has made this very easy and a welcomed solution.

The insights section provides a great overall state of the automation suite and can identify trends relatively quickly. If we see a dip in our passing rate over time, we can look at what changed when the test started failing to find the root cause rather than doing a quick fix to find that the test fails a short time later.

As stated earlier we use Sauce Labs for a combination of automated testing and manual testing. Therefore the most useful features are the ability to run the functional automated tests via a Sauce Labs tunnels which allows access to applications in our internal network. The second most useful feature is the manual side.

Sauce Lab analytics helped us to get detailed knowledge on test cases execution and logs.

The most valuable feature is the cross-browser feature, it has many android and iOS devices both simulators and real devices. It's easy to integrate. I also like video recording too.

As a web product QA team, we sometimes need to spot check some new child site on multiple browsers and OS(es). It was a little time consuming for us since we need to click on each of the browser/OS combinations and start a new session to test. Every sprint, with new features and child pages being added, we mostly need to do the same steps over and over again.

Overall, I think Sauce Labs provides us with a valuable tool and resource. As far as what could be improved, I would say the overall test execution time. Some of the calls take a bit longer than I expect, for example in web browser tests; while the execution time isn't obnoxious, it could be improved so that overall tests/test suites finish faster.

If I had to speak of an area that could be improved it would probably have to be the speed of interaction with the devices. There is at times a considerable amount of lag while using some of the virtual and at times even physical device farm

The one issue I have is the 14-day trial that a new user gets for free. I understand the concept of the trial period; however, I think this could be revamped to a free 30-minute run time every few months or after a significant update once the trial period has ended.

Another feature that could still be improved on is more error clarity. Sometimes when running automated scripts the test will fail on the device side instead of the script and errors only show a 500 try again message instead of a detailed script that could of a been a timeout error from the code.

We have found that during automated testing this can be very slow. This causes inconsistencies with the tests. It's very difficult to rely on a service when you can't be sure if a test will pass or fail the next time it runs. This means building in a lot of sync time into the tests which in turn slows them down. If this speed could be improved then the service would be much better.

They should provide a JIRA integration plugin so that we can easily log issues.

The only drawback is the speed, it will be good if we have a server in Asia too. It will be great if we can improve speed while initialization and execution.