Preface:
There are several UI testing tools available in the market like SilkTest,QTP, Selenium etc. and test automation engineers are using those tools depending on the requirement. Among these tools, Selenium is a popular open source UI automation tool. Now for some projects, customer asks us to run the automation test against different browsers on different platform. So to do this we have to setup our test automation tool / server on different platform with different browsers and also the major challenge is to setup different versions of same browser on same machine. So to overcome these issues either we use virtualization technology or setup multiple systems for this testing, which results in increased cost and complexity in maintenance of systems for testing. To solve this kind of issues and tasks, Saucelabs offers one of the good cloud based solution called “Sauce On Demand” which facilitates us to test our application with different environments using their different models of pricing. Following sections I will describe about basics of sauce on demand.
Introduction of Sauce On demand:
Sauce on demand is the Cloud based solution for UI testing using selenium by Saucelabs. In this configuration we can run our tests on Cloud servers with different OS and different browsers and their versions. To run the test we have to purchase a plan and saucelabs will provide access id for that subscription. So to run the test we have to pass access id, user credentials and configurations (against which we want to test) in JSON format. Sample code is available in online documentation of sauce on demand along with currently supported configurations.
The online documentation is available.
Infrastructure cost=0 and other benefits:
As described above you get the idea that for our testing we can run test against different OS and different browsers and their version by just passing the configuration details so the main advantage of this tool that it will not require any effort to setup infrastructure to test our software against different OS and browsers.
The other advantage is, it stores video of whole test along with full log so it will be easier to find the issues and also it is easily accessible and downloadable from their server.
If we use threading or some other execution optimization concepts than we can test our application against different configurations simultaneously. I think same concepts can be applied for load testing.
There are so many advantages but for that I will suggest you to test a trial of sauce on demand.
Limitations:
Currently some combinations of OS and browser are not available. Check following link for available combinations
For parallel or load testing we have to write script in our tool, but it would be nice if such capability was available as part of Sauce On Demand
Conclusion:
If you really want to test against different OS, browser and their versions then give a thought about exploring Sauce on demand or we can help you for analyzing and preparing the framework for your this type of requirement.
At the end..
Please correct me if any information is incorrect. If you have any questions or comments on this topic you can send your queries to akhil.patel@infostretch.com or leave a comment below.
