Online sales at Sainsbury’s deployed cross-browser test automation to increase application releases, saving days of software testing.
The supermarket chain sought to polish its e-commerce operation, turning to test automation specialists at BrowserStack.
Consequently, the company shaved 30 minutes off work on each required browser. In addition, testing times were reduced from four to nine days.
“For Sainsbury’s Groceries Online, a flawless front-end is non-negotiable,” BrowserStack noted.
“Any unnoticed user interface (UI) bugs can disrupt the buyer journey.”
Overall, Sainsbury’s doubled the frequency of its software releases. Their team used BrowserStack to scale testing across a range of popular browsers and devices, beginning with manual testing and moving towards automation.
Testing manually on BrowserStack enabled releases once a month. Then, they sought to ensure coverage across multiple combinations of browser, device and operating systems (OSes).
This task had also previously been “extremely time consuming”, according to BrowserStack.
Benefits of BrowserStack test automation
Manual regression testing once took five days per fortnightly release. This is even when the job is divided between several testers, according to BrowserStack, quoting Saradha Balaji, lead test automation engineer at Sainsbury’s.
“It took up too much time. We couldn’t concentrate on other sprint work. It just wasn’t feasible to spend ten days on regression a month to be able to release twice,” Balaji said.
“We cover end-to-end testing as part of regression, so it can frustrate anyone testing the same scenario across 10-20 browsers. There is a high chance of mistakes and oversight.”
Moving to automation with parallelisation capabilities was important, Balaji added, as well as access to Internet Explorer browsers. BrowserStack also integrated well with Cypress, which the company had already tried.
“Some of our applications still need Internet Explorer support. Via BrowserStack, we can test on Internet Explorer.”
Srividya Jayaram, test engineering manager at Sainsbury’s, said that BrowserStack’s Cypress integration meant the company could start testing simply by installing the command-line interface (CLI) and configuring test run settings.
“We also leveraged parallel testing on BrowserStack to run tests concurrently across a range of browsers and devices.”
Test automation benefits and beyond
The team used BrowserStack Live to test one-off live issues manually as needed. When customers reported such issues, the team could spin up the required real device on BrowserStack, recreate the issue, and start debugging.
“We run a common pack before releases, which can now be done by any team. This way, we don’t have to depend on anybody. It used to be a real headache before, so BrowserStack is a benefit for the entire team, not just the tester,” Jayaram said.
BrowserStack allows users to test code from Visual Studio and beta apps from App Center. Users can run automated tests on every commit from their CI/CD pipeline, receiving results directly in Jenkins and Slack. Teams can reproduce bugs fast and report straight to Jira.
Additionally, BrowserStack has just announced a partnership with mobile devops focused Bitrise. This would enable Bitrise and BrowserStack users to benefit from each other’s app automation offerings, the vendor said.
( Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash )
