A big challenge for QA teams during the pandemic has been a lack of access to on-premise device labs. It is unsafe to visit office spaces for device maintenance, and it's equally hard to keep devices up-to-date while working from home. It's also difficult to scale testing setups or add new device models.
It makes no economic sense to purchase multiple devices for each QA’s home office. In the off-chance that you’re willing to do this, disrupted supply chains have made it impossible.
Manual testing is crucial for checking real-world functionality, reproducing bugs, performing exploratory testing, and investigating support tickets—but it becomes hard to execute while working from home.
Virtual collaboration poses challenges of its own. Developers find it hard to explain features to QA folks, and support teams find it difficult to articulate bugs they can’t reproduce easily.
So how do you meet quality expectations while juggling distributed teams, time pressure, and inaccessibility to on-premise device labs?
Solving remote work challenges
While initial remote work challenges were around ensuring business continuity, the focus is now on efficiency. QA teams need to coordinate testing across multiple global locations, keep up with deploys over different timezones, track who is testing what and when, and make it easy to reproduce bugs from anywhere.
This can be solved by equipping teams with a reliable cloud testing solution, ensuring that QAs are able to test—and collaborate—from anywhere, at any time, easily. These cloud-based manual testing solutions need to address cost and speed concerns without compromising on quality.
Cloud testing would ensure every QA gets access to a large pool of testing devices on-demand. They can reproduce bugs on real user environments from the comfort of a home office. Even the worst bugs can be found and fixed remotely, without requiring a visit to the office. Thus unconstrained, teams can focus on delivering quality at speed—right from home.
Introducing BrowserStack for teams
We’re excited to announce Team Plans for BrowserStack Live and App Live, designed to make remote testing easy. You can add unlimited users to your BrowserStack subscription and bring your teams to a unified testing platform.
All your teams, from QA and dev to marketing and design, can enjoy the benefits of cross browser testing on our Real Device Cloud—for a fraction of the cost. You save more per user added!
Users get access to 2,000+ browsers and devices securely hosted in one of our 15 worldwide data centers. Any bugs found can instantly be filed through Jira, Slack, Trello, or GitHub.
BrowserStack for Teams also includes add-on enterprise benefits like access control, IP whitelisting, org-wide monitoring, SSO, priority support, and auto-provisioning/de-provisioning.
With a secure and reliable cloud-testing infrastructure in place, you no longer have to worry about inaccessibility to on-premise device labs. You can run thousands of manual tests right from home, implement fast feedback loops and ensure test coverage for business-critical processes to achieve quality in testing.
