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Posted May 22, 2023

Enterprise Strategy Group's Top Challenges with In-House Mobile Test Infrastructure

Enterprise Strategy Group's new report, Analyzing the Economic Benefits of Sauce Labs for Mobile Testing and TestOps, identifies the top challenges for today's mobile application development and testing teams, plus the economic benefits organizations can expect from using Sauce Labs for continuous testing.

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At Sauce Labs, we live and breathe software testing (in a manner of speaking, of course). We see firsthand the challenges our customers face every day as they try to keep up with the explosive growth of the global application market.

To best serve our customers, we wanted to take the pulse of the mobile development industry to understand the state of mobile application development and testing, including top challenges and trends. That's why we commissioned Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) to conduct an industry research survey and perform an Economic Validation of Sauce Labs solutions for mobile testing.

We're excited to share Enterprise Strategy Group's report, Analyzing the Economic Benefits of Sauce Labs for Mobile Testing and TestOps with you. The report includes ESG's analysis of data gathered from customer interviews, custom research, case studies, and TCO/ROI models to evaluate the quantitative and qualitative benefits Sauce Labs customers can expect from using the Sauce DevOps Test Toolchain — and Sauce Real Device Cloud in particular — for web and mobile application testing.

Download

Get your complimentary report

Download the full ESG economic analysis report to learn more about the state of mobile application development and testing and how Sauce Labs helps companies scale their mobile testing.

Top 8 Challenges of In-House Mobile Test Infrastructure

As part of their research, ESG identified the following top challenges of cloud-based mobile application testing vs. on-premises or hybrid test infrastructure:

  1. Increasing demand for applications, with nearly 86% of companies reporting an increase in applications they're developing.

  2. Delayed feedback loops, which decrease the speed and quality of app releases.

  3. Increased test case complexity as a result of the increasing complexity of apps and tech stacks.

  4. Cost of maintaining devices, with each company testing on an average of 82 different device/OS/browser combinations.

  5. Excessive false-negative results that distract development teams and destabilize release schedules.

  6. Testing bottlenecks from the inability to run parallel (concurrent) test sessions.

  7. High number of escaped defects, which creates a poor customer experience and increases technical debt.

  8. Lack of historical quality insights, which makes triaging and prioritizing defects more difficult, time-consuming, and costly.

Top challenges with on-premises and hybrid test infrastructures for mobile app testing

ESG's Key Findings on the State of Mobile Development & Testing

ESG's survey of 300 developers, test engineers, SREs, and product owners at mid-sized and enterprise companies revealed some interesting (and occasionally eye-opening) statistics on today's state of mobile application development and testing:

  • 50% of survey respondents doubled the number of mobile apps they develop in the past three years.

  • 76% of organizations plan to increase their testing capabilities in the next 12-24 months.

  • Two-thirds or more of companies agree they have issues with the scalability, cost, productivity, and completeness of increased testing that will help them get where they need to be.

  • 41% of developer time is spent on testing apps, which leaves only 59% for coding applications.

  • 65% of research respondents reported that their testing is comprised of at least 50% manual workflows and tasks.

  • 75% of participants with highly automated testing processes say their test/QA team is seen as a competitive differentiator.

This last statistic in particular backs up one of our core tenets at Sauce Labs: a combination of manual and automated testing is the best strategy for delivering quality applications at speed. When you deliver code that behaves exactly as it should, every time, you deliver an application experience that benefits both your customers and your company's bottom line.

Download

Get your complimentary report

Download the full ESG economic analysis report to learn more about the state of mobile application development and testing and how Sauce Labs helps companies scale their mobile testing.

4 Economic Benefits of Sauce Labs for Mobile Testing and TestOps

Bringing everything together: ESG's economic analysis identified ultimately found that Sauce Labs customers can expect to experience material benefits in four key areas:

Enterprise Strategy Group's validated benefits of Sauce Labs for mobile application testing
  1. Accelerated product releases - Sauce Labs customers can accelerate time to release by up to 50% compared to in-house testing environments, plus expect a 47% improvement in time to push code to production on a weekly or more frequent basis.

  2. Lower costs - Sauce Labs customers can eliminate approximately $200K in annual maintenance costs.

  3. Improved insight and agility - Sauce Labs customers can find and fix issues more efficiently by running more tests throughout development and post-release. In fact, many Sauce Labs customers interviewed by ESG said they conduct over 100 test sessions concurrently. This results in a 75-100% reduction in testing bottlenecks, a 75% improvement in reducing breaking changes, and a 150% improvement in feature rollbacks.

  4. Improved risk management - ESG found that Sauce Labs helps customers reduce the risk exposure of their software through more complete testing, hardened code, error reporting and diagnostics, proactive Support, and reduced staffing risk.

Download

Get your complimentary report

Download the full ESG economic analysis report to learn more about the state of mobile application development and testing and how Sauce Labs helps companies scale their mobile testing.

Watch Our Webinar On Demand

Watch the replay of the roundtable discussion between Nathan McAfee, Senior Economic Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, Wim Selles, Staff Product Manager at Sauce Labs, and Kristian DeVito, Senior Solutions Engineer at Sauce Labs. They discussed the key findings of ESG's research and how it impacts organizations that develop web and mobile applications. Watch now

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Director, Content Marketing at Sauce Labs
Published:
May 22, 2023
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