Developer productivity surges 3-4x with automated, cloud-based Selenium testing from Sauce Labs
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — (December 16, 2010) — Sauce Labs, the Selenium company, today announced that PBworks, the world’s leading provider of hosted collaboration solutions for business and education, has standardized its QA and development teams on Sauce OnDemand, the cross-browser testing service based on the Selenium testing framework.
As a result, developer productivity increased 3-4x which has enabled PBworks to deliver new features and product updates to customers in days, instead of weeks or months. “One QA manager using Sauce OnDemand does the work of what took 70 people at my previous company, There.com,” said David Weekly, founder and chief product officer of PBworks.
PBworks serves millions of users per month, including many of the world’s largest businesses, advertising agencies, law firms, and educational institutions. It’s a competitive market, and to stay ahead, the company needs to roll out new features much more quickly while fixing technical issues before they become problems for customers. The responsibility of this falls on the QA team, led by Ian Danforth, who tells the story of their path to success using Sauce OnDemand in a just-released video.
Prior to using the Sauce OnDemand cloud service, Danforth and his team used Selenium Grid. While this was a better solution than manual testing, it still required the management of hardware needed to support multiple browsers and operating systems. When Sauce Labs introduced Sauce OnDemand, Danforth saw an opportunity to move all Selenium-based functional testing to the cloud and remove the operational overhead of managing their own testing grid.
“Sauce OnDemand delivers instant scalability and cost savings,” said Danforth. “For anyone developing web applications today, using the cloud for functional testing is the only way to go because it saves you the time and money required to build and maintain an infrastructure that successful companies will invariably outgrow. We push new code twice a week, so if there is an issue or urgent customer feature request, the change can be implemented in just a few days.”
Sauce OnDemand has allowed PBworks to successfully scale their infrastructure and increase the number of tests they run without dealing with procuring, configuring, installing and maintaning physical hardware on-premise. Due to the inherent scalability of the cloud and ability to run tests in parallel, when using Sauce OnDemand, the feedback is almost immediate, and the service so reliable that developers are willing to write more functional tests because they’re confident they will function dependably. With Sauce OnDemand, PBworks is pushing the limits of what it can do as a development and QA organization.
“As development teams move closer and closer to continuous integration and agile, automated cross-browser testing becomes a critical component,” said John Dunham, CEO of Sauce Labs. “The impact Sauce OnDemand has had on PBworks in terms of scalability, reliability and meaningful feedback affirms the work we’ve put into delivering the best cloud-based testing service possible.”
