Automated testing for web apps has been around for well over a decade. For much of that time, Selenium has reigned supreme as the go-to testing framework for virtually any type of testing need that involves a browser-based app. But as the world of test automation continues to evolve, newer tools have emerged. Chief among them is Cypress, a testing framework that is becoming an increasingly popular alternative to Selenium. Is Selenium or Cypress a better choice for your automated testing needs?

JavaScript consistently ranks as the world’s most popular programming language among developers. It should come as no surprise, then, that a variety of JavaScript test automation frameworks are available to help developers test JavaScript apps. Here’s a look at the top five such frameworks, with tips on the pros and cons of each.

Spending via smartphones is going up. According to Forbes, smartphones accounted for 46.5% of all holiday sales on Thanksgiving Day 2020, and 40% of sales on Black Friday. This means close to half of all purchases were made not only online, but on a smartphone—which makes the mobile shopping experience all the more critical. Customers expect their transactions and experiences to go off without a hitch. And if that doesn’t happen?

In recent years, there’s been a shift towards broader adoption of JavaScript test automation frameworks. Today our customers are using Cypress, TestCafe, Puppeteer, and most recently, Playwright. Plus, they are often using these alongside existing Selenium and mobile test automation frameworks. The options for testing have increased, and depending on your unique testing needs, you may be adopting one or many solutions in your organization.

We’ve covered a lot of ground in the past few blog posts, including how to contribute to the project, and some details of what you can expect as a Selenium user. But there’s more to Selenium than just the APIs you use to write your tests, and one of the big features we’ve not covered yet is the refreshed Selenium Grid: a mechanism that allows you to distribute your tests across a fleet of machines.

Like most other companies (essential workers notwithstanding), we were forced to shift to an all-remote workforce, meaning many Saucers found themselves working from home for the first time. This presented challenges, of course—some of us simultaneously became homeschool teachers, we lost the ability to have quick hallway conversations, and we just plain missed seeing our coworkers—but in the end, we rallied together and embraced the new normal (or should we say the Zoom normal?).

By now you may have seen the news that Sauce Labs has acquired API Fortress, a leading provider of modern API testing solutions for agile and DevOps teams. This is an exciting milestone for us, and we are thrilled to welcome the capable API Fortress team into the Sauce Labs team! Here, I’d like to go into a bit more depth on why we did this acquisition and what this will mean for our customers.

Sauce Labs provides a number of features that help secure your testing experience and ensure that your data and applications are safe while using our cloud platform. One of the most popular features is Sauce Connect Proxy—a built-in HTTP proxy server that opens a secure "tunnel" connection for testing between a Sauce Labs virtual machine or real device and a website or mobile app hosted on your local computer ("localhost") or behind a corporate firewall.

Sauce Connect Proxy™ is a built-in HTTP proxy server that opens a secure "tunnel" connection for testing between a Sauce Labs virtual machine or real device and a website or mobile app hosted on your local computer ("localhost") or behind a corporate firewall. It provides a means for Sauce Labs to access your application or website.

A product manager’s job first and foremost is to deliver value to their customers with the products they oversee. In order to ensure quality, those products need to be tested. Testing before release in a well thought-out manner gives product managers the confidence to create and execute high quality products and user experiences.