Engineering leaders we’ve spoken to describe a similar situation: Their teams are producing more code than ever, thanks to AI assistants that make writing nearly effortless. However, knowing, before you deploy, that the thing you built actually works has become the most challenging task in the organization.
Amid this code verification crisis, test automation as we’ve known it for two decades has hit its ceiling. The question has progressed beyond “did the tests pass?” to “can I trust this release?” We spent nearly 20 years perfecting the first question. Now we’re rebuilding around the second.
The shift from test automation to release assurance informs why we’re reshaping Sauce Labs as a company.
Why Sauce Labs? And why now?
We didn’t arrive at release assurance from the outside looking in. Our founders created Selenium and Appium, the open-source frameworks that a huge share of the industry still runs on. We’ve spent two decades executing more than 8.7 billion real-world tests for teams ranging from scrappy startups to 80% of the F2000’s top 10 financial institutions.
Our historical expertise informs why this evolution belongs to us and why it plays out across the whole company rather than as one new product bolted onto an old one. Sauce Labs AURA is the clearest expression of this evolution.
What is Sauce Labs AURA?
AURA is Sauce Labs’ AI-Unified Release Assurance platform that connects our suite of testing and quality solutions into a single continuous learning system. Across the full software development lifecycle, it extracts business intent from requirements and pull requests, generates and runs tests, correlates failures against nearly two decades of real-world execution data, and closes the loop by feeding production errors back into test coverage.
If you already use Sauce Labs, you haven’t been left behind by some shiny new thing you now need to buy. AURA gathers the capabilities you’ve been using — device testing, visual checks, accessibility, app distribution, the analytics that show what broke, crash and error reporting — and stitches them into a system that behaves like a coherent whole rather than a collection of tools that happen to share a login.
Think of your testing tools like musicians who’ve each been playing well on their own, just never from the same sheet of music. AURA is the conductor. Rather than replacing the players, it gets everyone reading the same score, so the individual parts finally add up to something whole.
Where we landed on the human question
There’s a debate about how much engineering judgment should be handed to machines. It’s a debate Sauce Labs has had internally, too, and it shaped how we evolved our platform.
Our answer: The machine should carry the load, and the person should keep the wheel. AURA takes on the grind — repetitive authoring, execution, analysis, exhausting hunts for a root cause at 2 a.m. — and hands you back the time and clarity to make the calls that need human judgment. When something is ready to go live, that’s still your decision.
With AURA, you don’t have to pick between speed and quality on every release.
Meeting your developers where they already are
We spent a lot of energy making sure this fits how people actually work, instead of bolting yet another destination onto their day.
If your team lives inside AI coding assistants, our MCP server lets them reach the platform straight from the tools they’re already prompting — Claude, Gemini, Copilot — using ordinary language instead of custom-built integrations. Ask for a test, run it on a real device, pull up quality data, or chase down a flaky failure, all through conversation. And because it leans on your own model, your data doesn’t wander somewhere you can’t see it.
For developers who live in the editor, our IDE extension brings testing right up to the moment code is written. Real devices, live logs, generated tests from a plain description of what you want — no context-switching, no waiting for a handoff to catch what you missed. Sauce Labs AURA opens the door to what “shift left” was always supposed to feel like.
Paying attention after deployment
Most testing tools go quiet the moment code ships. Sauce Labs doesn’t, so we’ve brought AI to production, where the truth lives.
Sauce AI for Error Reporting reads your crash and error data in real time, spots the patterns and root causes that never surface in a dev environment, and points your team toward fixes instead of leaving them to dig. With error reporting now folded into our insights experience, what’s happening in the wild and what happened pre-production finally sit side by side. The whole health of your application, from intent through to what your users experience, in one view.
The truth behind the numbers
Teams using AURA are seeing real movement: production incidents down 90%+, releases reaching market at least 47% faster, 38% or more engineering capacity reclaimed for people who’d rather build than babysit flaky pipelines, and a Forrester-validated 217% return on investment, with payback in under six months.
We’d rather your engineers stop bracing for the next incident than have you fixate on the percentages. When verification keeps pace with code generation, the fear drains out of shipping. The numbers are just how that shows up on a dashboard.
Release assurance: Sauce Labs, evolved
We built AURA for teams who can't afford to choose between moving quickly and sleeping at night, which is just about everyone writing software at scale. We built it as the same company that's been solving pieces of this problem since before "AI-generated code" was a phrase anyone used.
Sauce Labs AURA is available now. See what it looks like in your own environment at saucelabs.com/request-demo.
