Year in review: 2019

2019 has been a year of endings—Game of Thrones, The Big Bang Theory, Silicon Valley, and of course, the Avengers. Over the past decade, we’ve loved and laughed with pop culture icons as they took on white walkers, science, aliens, and bugs. For our part, we’ve attacked bugs too, striving continuously to make applications—more specifically, BrowserStack—better.

Much like our heroes, we’ve come a long way since our origin. In this year alone, we moved to a swanky new office, doubled our employee count, and traveled to Dubai for our annual offsite. More importantly, we made a lot of improvements and launched new features, to ensure our customers get the best experience possible:

A new Data Center

We launched a new Data Center in US East. How will this benefit you? You can now connect to BrowserStack’s Real Device Cloud faster than ever before. This means faster testing, more accurate results, and quality releases—wherever you are.

A Meetup in the Bay Area

50+ automation engineers and developers networked over pizza and craft beer at our first-ever meetup, in San Francisco. We got CEO Ritesh Arora and three brilliant QAs to share their knowledge about:

  1. 'Small Agile Projects’

Lannette Creamer from The Omni Group talked about how QAs can ship faster—while juggling several smaller projects of varying deadlines. Lanette used quirky artwork (and a slew of cat pictures) to drive home insights about how to survive chaotic QA schedules without compromising quality. She gave actionable tips to practice lean agile thought and see smaller projects through.

2. 'Going from no QA to a fully integrated QA'

Priyanka Halder from GoodRx talked about what it takes to set up, run, and scale a fully-fledged QA function. She emphasized some key findings from her experience: establishing a setup that's the best fit for an organization's scale and context, and how to gradually make the move to automation.

3. ‘Avoiding Continuous Disintegration’

Brian Lucas from Optimizely talked about Optimizely's experiments with QA processes—how they eliminated the back-and-forth between the dev and test teams and made quality assurance a collective undertaking. He talked about scaling QA cleanly (with a complex product) and testing early, often, and with entire engineering teams as participants.

4. 'The BrowserStack story'

Ritesh Arora, co-founder and CEO of BrowserStack talked about BrowserStack's beginnings—how he, with co-founder and CTO Nakul Aggarwal, came up with BrowserStack in 2011—having been thoroughly frustrated by the setup required for cross-browser testing. He traced the journey to the present and emphasized the BrowserStack mission: empower developers to ship quality releases with confidence.

A better dashboard for Automate and App Automate

Based on feedback from our users, we redesigned the dashboard for Automate and App Automate. The new dashboard gives you the results you want in fewer clicks, is easier to navigate, more scalable, and fully optimized for performance. You can find—and fix—bugs faster than ever before.

Selenium 4 with Simon Stewart

We hosted Simon Stewart (creator of WebDriver and core-contributor to the Selenium project) for a webinar on Selenium 4. Simon spoke about the philosophy behind this major, much anticipated upgrade and what it will mean for the QA community.

A new device to test on

We added iPhone 11 to the BrowserStack Real Device Cloud. Add this to your test suite to ensure your web and mobile apps are ready for the market. If you’re unsure which devices to test on, check out the ‘Recommendations’ panel in your Live toolbar. To validate your UI/UX, you can take screenshots on these devices or get them regularly emailed to you.

New integrations for increased productivity

We’ve added a host of new integrations so you can get test results delivered directly, create and send bug reports to Jira, install your mobile apps instantly, and test your ReactJS code.

  • Slack: Get notified on Slack for every test failure. Receive daily build summaries populated with test name and reason for failure. Send bug reports from BrowserStack to any Slack user or channel.
  • App Center: Test your Microsoft App Center builds on BrowserStack. Install apps directly to BrowserStack devices using REST API and public URL. Access the latest versions each time you log in.
  • Jira: File bugs directly from the BrowserStack platform. Each bug report is automatically populated with browser/OS version, device and screen resolution details—and annotated screenshots.
  • React developer tools: Access the React Developer Tools extensions pre-installed in every recent desktop browser. Debug your front-end code easily.

Testing for Fragmentation: A blog series

How do you deliver awesome experiences when there so many different devices, browsers and OSes?

We set out to find the answer to that question. This led us to ‘Testing for Fragmentation’. This is a blog series that takes a data-based approach to understand what makes browsers, devices, and platforms different, how their diversity affects end-user experience, and what 2 million+ developers on BrowserStack do to account for it.

Check out:

  1. 'Fragmentation in OS, browsers, and devices', an infographic
  2. 'The perfect cross-device test strategy for mobile'
  3. ‘Is your UX tested for Global Compatibility?’

Open Source Spotlight

Open Source powers the internet, but what motivates someone to contribute to it? What makes the superheroes tick?

We went directly to these selfless adventurers to find out. Here are the stories, as told by the stand-out developers who contribute to open-source:

If you are an open source contributor, you can fill out this form for free, lifelong access to BrowserStack (for all your testing needs).

BrowserStack in the GitHub Student Developer Pack

We’ve partnered with GitHub to provide a free 1-year subscription to BrowserStack. As part of the GitHub Student Developer Pack program, students get a free license for BrowserStack Automate Mobile worth $2,388/yr.

Well, that wraps up a productive year for BrowserStack. Merry Christmas and a happy new year, folks!

Happy testing!