2020 Firsts

Like most other companies (essential workers notwithstanding), we were forced to shift to an all-remote workforce, meaning many Saucers found themselves working from home for the first time. This presented challenges, of course—some of us simultaneously became homeschool teachers, we lost the ability to have quick hallway conversations, and we just plain missed seeing our coworkers—but in the end, we rallied together and embraced the new normal (or should we say the Zoom normal?). 

As the events of 2020 unfolded, we had to transform our popular SauceCon user conference into a virtual event: SauceCon Online. Although we missed seeing the testing community in person, we were able to host the event in two different time zones, which meant we could include people who might not otherwise be able to join us on-site. In fact, we were thrilled to have more than 5,000 registrants from 98 countries across two days! And thanks to a knowledgeable group of speakers and sponsors, the agenda was packed full of testing goodness, helping everyone in attendance to “Test Better, Together.” We also turned our Test Automation Days into virtual events, and were able to host different sessions by customer and by industry. Look for a virtual Test Automation Day near you soon! 

We’re also reprising SauceCon Online April 20-22, so save the date and submit a speaking proposal if you’d like to contribute.

Open source is part of our DNA here at Sauce. In 2020, we created our Open Source Program Office to deepen our investment in the broader open source community. This was a key part of our strategy to truly leverage sustainable and active support for open source software (OSS) within the company, and adding this was a huge highlight of 2020. 

In March 2020, we celebrated the three billionth test on the Sauce Labs platform. Yep, you read that right: three billion! We’ve learned a lot after that many tests, and we’ve gained expertise across many facets of testing. In 2020, we launched our second annual Continuous Testing Benchmark Report, documenting observations based on those three billion tests. This report shows key performance benchmarks necessary to deliver automated testing at enterprise scale as well as how real-world organizations performed against those benchmarks. Now, our Data Science team is applying Machine Learning (ML) and pattern recognition against this rich store of data to provide our users with the guidance they need to improve their automated testing success. 

In 2020, we acquired Dave Haeffner's Elemental Selenium content library and site properties—and turned them into a great new training resource we’re calling Sauce School. Testers have long used Elemental Selenium to learn how to automate their tests. This content is not only relevant to folks just getting started with Selenium, but also for experienced automation engineers who want to brush up on best practices and advanced concepts like parallel testing.  Dave’s Selenium guidance combined with the Sauce Labs platform offers a powerful combination of comprehensive testing coverage and proven real-world advice—an unbeatable formula that will help testing newbies and veterans alike. 

Based on the Elemental Selenium guidance, our new Sauce School offering offers how-to tutorials and testing best practices for beginners and experienced automation engineers alike on topics such as Selenium, JavaScript and Java, with instructions for tools and test runners such as Mocha, JUnit, Jenkins, npm, Maven, Python, Pytest, and all things Sauce Labs.

In December, we achieved Service Organization Control (SOC) 2 Type 2 certification, confirming that select company security processes, procedures, and controls have been formally evaluated and tested by an independent accounting and auditing firm and met the rigorous SOC 2 security standards. We’ve always been committed to security, and this is just further proof of that commitment. 

We recently acquired API Fortress, a leading provider of modern API testing solutions for agile and DevOps teams. This is a huge milestone for us and we were happy to welcome the API Fortress team to the Sauce Labs lineup. Adding API Fortress to our product offering means we will be able to offer customers a richer and more complete continuous testing experience that includes API testing, visual end-to-end testing, and front-end performance testing to go along with the functional UI testing that Sauce Labs is already known for.

We hope that 2021 is filled with even more firsts, and that we’ll be able to enjoy them in person.  In the meantime, we wish you good health and as always… happy testing!