2020 has been a year out of the ordinary in many ways. It was the year of rethinking the way we worked—a year of participating in a massive global experiment of working from home; a year of making critical business decisions over virtual meetings; a year of major cultural shifts and learning; and also the one of putting the lanyards away and working in pajamas.
Months of lockdown forced us to adapt and improvise, and improvise we did. The work-from-home territory was an unfamiliar one but we steadily adapted to the “new normal”. We rolled out some of our most sought after features, added new data centers, launched a new product, sponsored over 1,000 open-source projects, and acquired Percy—all in a single year while working out of our homes, across six time zones!
As 2020 comes to a close, we look back at some of these milestones that kept us going:
New data centers across three continents
In our effort to ensure faster testing to our entire customer base spread across 135 countries, we added three new mobile and desktop data centers in Mumbai, Sydney and Frankfurt. The addition of new data centers enables developers to test on devices faster than ever before while guaranteeing higher performance, device availability and redundancy.
SpeedLab: A free tool to optimize website speed
We launched SpeedLab, a free tool that helps you test website speed across our wide range of browsers and devices at the same time. By doing so, you can identify browser or device-specific issues that may be affecting the performance of your website. The actionable insights drawn from these tests enable you to optimize your page speed and deliver the best experience to every user.
Support for Cypress
We introduced support for Cypress on BrowserStack Automate in July, becoming the first cloud infrastructure for running Cypress test automation out of the box. With this integration, teams can now continuously run Cypress tests on multiple browsers in parallel without having to continually update browser versions or maintain docker containers at every test run. This integration equips teams with comprehensive cross-browser coverage and the scale of testing on the cloud.
Visual testing and reviews with Percy
In July, we announced the acquisition of Percy—the world’s leading visual testing and review platform.
Our mission has always been to empower developers to build amazing experiences, and this acquisition is a huge step in this direction. With the addition of Percy to our suite of products, teams can not only test their code for accurate behavior but also for visual correctness. You can now automate visual testing, detect even the most elusive visual changes and deliver pixel-perfect UI with confidence.
It was an interesting experience for teams at BrowserStack and Percy to collaborate with each other across locations and time zones. Hands down, this one has been one of our most exciting projects in 2020!
Breakpoint: Our first-ever virtual summit
From writing your first test scripts to building a continuous delivery pipeline, automating at scale and learning about the tools of the trade—Breakpoint covered it all. With a whopping 10,000 registrations from 155 countries, this 4-day virtual summit held in July, welcomed an inspiring lineup from the best dev and QA teams across the world including Twitter, Selenium, The Weather Channel, Trivago, Robot Framework, and more, talk about how they test their software.
Visual Reviews 2.0
Just within six months since the acquisition, we rolled out Visual Reviews 2.0—a ground-up redesign of Percy’s visual review experience. Optimized for performance, context and flexibility, the new experience introduced game-changing features such as keyboard shortcuts, visual change indicators and dark mode, among others. Already popular among our users, the redesign makes navigation easier, scales with your growing testing needs, helps detect visual changes with higher speed and accuracy, and gives you all of this in fewer clicks.
Open Source Sponsorships
Open source powers the internet, and as a company that was built using open source tools, giving back to the open source community has been one of our top priorities. As part of our Open Source sponsorship program, we sponsored a total of 1,270 open source projects this year, providing developers with free lifetime access to all our products to help them speed up testing and ship faster.
And some awards
We are delighted to share with you that G2 has announced BrowserStack as 2021 Leaders in the Test Automation Software category. Here's a big thank you to our happy customers and users who helped us get these distinctions!
There is no simple way to sum up this year. What we can say though, is that we definitely made it count with some of our best releases so far. Here’s hoping that 2021 is kinder to the world and that we continue to thrive as we did this time. Season’s greetings to you all!
