Many Sauce Labs customers work in large development teams, with dozens of engineers who write and run tests. We recently added new features to make life better for whoever ends up managing these teams of Sauce users.
For a while Sauce accountholders have been able to create subaccounts so their teams can all run tests under one billing account. This flat structure got a bit unwieldy, so we recently redesigned the subaccounts page to allow for more complex team designs, including the ability to designate certain accounts as admin accounts which can add or delete other subaccounts, and move them around to form pretty much any arbitrary team structure.
In case you've never visited your subaccounts page, the screenshot to the right should help you navigate to it. The rest of this article will be a bit of a tutorial on how to use the new features I just mentioned.
The biggest change is the ability to create a tree-like hierarchy for your team. Let's imagine that Sauron was the head of a QA department. His subaccounts page might now look like this:
The first thing to note is that there are two types of subaccounts: admins and regular users. Both can have subaccounts of their own, but admins can manage subaccounts for their parents. In this example, Saruman could add new subaccounts for Sauron, or, say, update Gollum's e-mail address. This is a convenient way to hand off responsibility for team management to people you trust (though if I were Sauron, I wouldn't trust Saruman that much). The way to view all these subaccounts is also much improved; you can navigate through multiple levels of a tree structure:
There is also a new way to get usage data from this structure: rollup mode. Rollup mode takes each account with subaccounts and, instead of showing you usage for that account itself, shows you the total usage for itself and all its descendants. This is a convenient way of comparing usage for different subsections of your team.
Setting up a hierarchy is easy. Simply click "Add" on the subaccounts page, or edit an existing user. You'll now be able to say which account should own it.
If you're the main account, you can also designate which subaccounts should be admins by checking the "Admin?" box in the form:
Then, when your admins log in, they'll be able to see the whole team and manage your other subaccounts for you (and they'll get a little notice to let them know why they're seeing all these accounts):
We hope you enjoy these new features and that it makes managing your testing team a more streamlined experience! Please feel free to give us feedback and let us know what else would be useful to you.
