New department to drive significant increase in support for open source initiatives
SAN FRANCISCO – February 27, 2020 – Sauce Labs Inc., the leading provider of continuous testing solutions that deliver digital confidence, today announced the formation of its first-ever Open Source Program Office, further strengthening its already significant investment in the broader open source community. The new department will develop, define, and implement the company’s long-term open source strategy while paving the way for increased contribution to high-value community projects. The office will be led by John Kelly, the company’s recently appointed chief technology officer, and will include notable open source experts and community contributors such as Christian Bromann, Diego Molina, and Isaac Murchie.
“The establishment of this office is an acknowledgment that open source is the soul of our company,” said Kelly. “We were co-founded by the creator of Selenium, and our legacy of open source leadership is why so many customers trust us to build digital confidence. As a company and a community, we have only scratched the surface of what’s possible with open source, not just with established projects like Selenium, Appium, and WebDriverIO, but also with newer ones like Puppeteer and Playwright. The opportunities are endless and we’re excited to increase our contributions.”
In addition to establishing and executing the company’s open source strategy for its own solution offerings, the new department will work directly with leaders of open source projects both established and emergent to drive increased collaboration across all of Sauce Labs. The group will also continue to grow and nurture the company’s popular and long-standing “Open Sauce” program, which provides free access to its continuous testing platform for qualified open source projects.
Sauce experts appointed to Selenium leadership committees
The formation of the new Open Source Program Office comes just days after multiple Sauce Labs experts were appointed to critical leadership committees for the Selenium project, the de facto standard open source tool for automated testing of web applications. Marcus Merrell, senior director of field services for Sauce Labs and a long-standing leader within the Selenium community, was appointed to the Selenium Project Leadership Committee, while both Molina and Titus Fortner, senior solution architect, were appointed to the newly formed Selenium Technical Leadership Committee. The appointments were announced at last week’s SeleniumCamp Conference in Kiev.
The company’s deep ties to the open source community extend beyond Selenium as well. Murchie is currently the Project Lead for Appium, the de facto standard for automated testing of mobile applications, and Bromann is the Project Lead for WebDriverIO, a JavaScript-based test automation framework for cross-browser testing. In addition, Bromann, Fortner, Merrell, and Molina were the only vendor delegates at the recent W3C Browser Testing and Tools Working Group, which endorsed WebDriver as a “Recommended” standard. The company is also closely involved in a number of foundations that maintain open source projects, including the OpenJS Foundation, where Bromann is a member of the Cross Project Council, helping foster collaboration between projects and the larger community.
The company’s expanded investment in the open source community comes amid a period of significant growth. Nearly 3 million tests are now run each day across its continuous testing cloud platform, which spans thousands of browser/OS, mobile emulator, simulator and real device combinations.
About Sauce Labs
Sauce Labs is the leading provider of continuous testing solutions that deliver digital confidence. The Sauce Labs Continuous Testing Cloud delivers a 360-degree view of a customer’s application experience, ensuring that web and mobile applications look, function, and perform exactly as they should on every browser, OS, and device, every single time. Sauce Labs is a privately held company funded by Toba Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Centerview Capital Technology, IVP, Adams Street Partners and Riverwood Capital.
