BrowserStack, which now supports the latest Firefox versions (75, 76) and Samsung Galaxy S20 devices, has showcased the value of cross-browser software testing in a customer story from Apptio.
Apptio turned to BrowserStack to eliminate testing bottlenecks that were reducing agility and holding it back from growing its customer base.
Apptio’s complex, layered systems around enterprise app optimisation mean a minor error can result in a cascade of incorrect forecasts and expensively misallocated resources for customers.
“As part of a good test suite, we needed to have cross-browser testing as well,” according to Paule Grow, Apptio‘s tester-turned-software tooling engineer.
Apptio had been running UI, functional and end-to-end test suites on an in-house server farm, outfitted with Linux and Firefox. Over time, as usage trends shifted and Apptio expanded into international markets, it was time to expand browser coverage.
“TechOps helped us install Chrome on the server farm,” Grow says. “It worked—sort of—but we needed to keep the Chrome versions up to date.”
Server storage restrictions meant updating browser versions became a bottleneck in Apptio’s continuous testing workflow. It moved to cross-browser testing for every stage of Agile development
And with CI, dev and QA fully integrated with BrowserStack, Apptio was able to significantly reduce build times.
“We can test each build and know exactly what’s in each of them. [BrowserStack] speeds up deployment and improves quality,” according to Grow. “There’s a logical separation in our testing now. We copy all our test suites—UI, functional, end-to-end—and run them on 5-10 different browsers.
“It gives us visibility. If a test fails once, we know it’s a browser compatibility issue. If it fails on all of them, there’s an error in application logic.”
Apptio uses machine learning to gain an overall, business-centred view of technology costs across customer IT portfolios, from on-premises and cloud systems to vendors and projects. This helps drive optimisation of enterprise apps to help leaders make investment choices, set future targets, and measure business results.
“With more teams automating their tests, our test suites are expanding rapidly. But with parallel sessions and queuing, we know we can continue to scale with our customers,” Grow says.
A full guide to cross-browser testing and its usefulness in today’s heterogeneous mobile tech environments can be downloaded here.
Apart from the redesigned search bar, the new Firefox versions supported by BrowserStack also support image loading attributes and feature a better Instant Evaluation experience for console expressions.
BrowserStack describes and discusses fragmentation as the diversity of browsers, devices and platform versions in use at any given point in time. There are some handy device configuration screenshots on its website at https://www.browserstack.com/screenshots# .
Read the full Apptio case study – and many other customer stories – here.
