How Hootsuite reduced visual bugs by 35% to ensure a more consistent UI with Sauce Labs

Hootsuite, a global leader in social media management, helps over 4,000 enterprise organizations and millions of users publish content across social media platforms. For Roy Tang, Mobile QA Developer at Hootsuite, ensuring top-notch software quality is critical—with Hootsuite, businesses are enabled to better engage with their customers, driving brand loyalty, deeper relationships, and bottomline. 

With this in mind, Hootsuite’s mobile and web applications must work perfectly across every digital platform, every time. Discover how Sauce Labs’s continuous, comprehensive quality platform supports Hootsuite’s developers in fighting bugs without compromising productivity and innovation. 

As Hootsuite's business expanded, it needed to ensure its digital experiences were clean and consistent to meet growing customer demands. To achieve this, Hootsuite aimed to focus on automation, accelerating the speed and frequency of its release cycles.

Before Sauce Labs, Hootsuite’s quality practices were tedious, costly, and prone to human error. Maintaining an in-house device farm was inefficient and visual UI testing was even more challenging – built and maintained by a sole engineer who eventually departed the business, leaving Roy to clean up the disorganized system. Each week, Roy spent one to two days on UI testing. This approach was susceptible to overlooking subtle visual inconsistencies, increasing the risk of bugs and delaying release cycles.

Hootsuite eventually reached its breaking point. During a major mobile app update, a small yet important visual indicator—a green check mark that shows users which social platforms they’re posting on—went unnoticed by traditional functional tests. The CEO discovered the missing green check mark only after the update went live. This seemingly tiny bug caused chaos, such as increased support tickets, negative customer sentiment, and the threat of churned users.

As Roy explained, "If a user finds a bug, they will post about it on social media, or flood support with tickets, which hurts our brand and drains customer support resources.” Hoosuite knew something had to change. 

Hootsuite turned to Sauce Labs to achieve continuous quality by leveraging scalable test automation and infrastructure, freeing them from the costly inefficiencies of an in-house device farm and manual testing. 

Now, Roy and his team can more easily test critical areas of the Hootsuite app to ensure a flawless user experience, including: 

Hootsuite configured tests to run simultaneously across different devices, enabling faster issue detection and more efficient test coverage. With Sauce Visual, Hootsuite can ensure UI consistency across different screen sizes and operating systems by validating color themes, branding, icons and more running UI tests on both simulators and real devices. By integrating visual testing into its CI/CD pipelines and leveraging features like UI Ignore Regions, Full-Page Screenshots, and DOM Diffing Support, Roy’s team can more effectively identify UI discrepancies during every release cycle.  

Hootsuite recently automated visual testing on their native mobile app, significantly reducing the time and complexity involved in their testing workflows. “By just adding one line of code, we were up and running with Sauce Visual for Mobile in less than five minutes,” said Roy, adding that these new tests had a 99% to 100% pass rate during the first sprint.

With Sauce Labs, Hootsuite now benefits from comprehensive, seamlessly integrated testing across the entire development lifecycle, from development to production. Partnering with Sauce Labs gives Hootsuite confidence in its test automation, real-time insights, and fast feedback loops, accelerating innovation, enhancing efficiency, and improving software quality at every stage of development.

For Hootsuite, Sauce Labs Visual testing has delivered three core improvements:

By adopting Sauce Labs, Hootsuite improved release quality and speed, allowing teams to release features faster and more confidently. By quickly identifying UI discrepancies, essentially eliminating manual UI testing, Hootsuite has fewer bugs and a more consistent user experience across devices, which is critical for retaining enterprise customers. 

Sauce Labs enabled Hootsuite to streamline its testing process, accelerate releases, and enhance the user experience. Learn how to improve your digital experiences with Sauce Visual and get started with Sauce Labs today!