Modern software moves fast. Every hour saved or wasted could be the difference between your release hitting the market before or after your competitors'.
To help you maximize engineering efficiency and ship faster, there is a wide array of tools available for use. But switching between them is eating into your productivity by 40% (according to a study by the federal aviation administration and the University of Michigan).
When it comes to testing and debugging efficiency, we've got your back. BrowserStack integrates with a host of developer tools to minimize the need to switch context.
Here are all the different scenarios in which BrowserStack can help you become a productivity ninja.
Trigger automated testing—across browsers and devices—at every commit
Sixty percent of developers report automating the software development lifecycle as a top priority.
DevOps maintains the environments, frameworks, tooling, etc.—everything necessary for automating repeatable processes within a development lifecycle. A stable DevOps pipeline ensures that your team can focus on building amazing experiences and an exhaustive test case library.
One of those processes in the pipeline is automated testing of every build.
By integrating BrowserStack with your favorite CI/CD tool, you get zero-touch test automation that's scaled to browser/device combinations of your choice. It eliminates the need to switch between dashboards to debug or check reports. The test details are available in your CI/CD tool.
To learn more, check out our Jenkins integration and TravisCI integration
Stay up to speed with Slack
“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” — Agile manifesto
It's easy to lose context in rapid development lifecycles of Agile. To keep everyone in-sync with the features undergoing development and drive conversations around critical issues, you have team communication tools like Slack.
We built an integrations that put Slack at the center of software development:
- The team gets daily build summaries on a Slack channel of choice through a simple integration with Automate (or App Automate). You also get instant notifications when a build fails, complete with error details and links to the test session videos.
- While testing manually on BrowserStack Live, you can find bugs and share them with team members by integrating Live with Slack complete with details like URL tested, device / browser / OS / resolution and screenshots. There's also a link which spins up the same environment for recreating the error in a single click.
We will update as we integrate with more communication tools.
Make bug filing less tedious
Project management tools help increase your team's productivity—by giving everyone clear visibility into tasks that need to be done and by who. As you find bugs, you file them in your project management tool and assign them to the right team members.
To minimize the eventual back-and-forth between the dev and QA teams, QAs manually add error details to the tickets: the step/interaction, the failure, device/browser it occurred in, etc., we created integrations with tools like Jira, GitHub, and Trello so QAs wouldn't have to fill the tickets with context.
You can create a bug ticket as soon as you find the bug while doing manual/exploratory type testing (through Live and App Live)—and assign them to team members.
The real deal? The integrations automatically populate the tickets with the information your developers need to reproduce the bug—a link to the test session, the screenshot, and the device, OS, and browser in which the bug appeared.
You can read more about how James Stones, a senior software engineer at Futurice, improved design review speeds using BrowserStack with Jira.
Read about how the engineering team at Futurice optimized their design review process using BrowserStack and Jira.
Visually analyze responsive WordPress designs with a single click
40% of the world’s top 1 million websites use a CMS tool for creating their static pages.
A CMS helps you build great websites quickly, but you still need to test those websites for functional and UI issues across browsers and devices.
To automate the visual testing of Wordpress websites, we built a plugin that loads your website in different browsers and devices and takes screenshots of it. You can quickly analyze how your website looks in different screen sizes and resolutions on real mobile devices and browsers.
Note: We have more integrations coming up with Shopify and HubSpot to pace up your responsive design testing. Stay tuned.
Streamline developers' debugging workflow
A developer spends 75% of his time debugging.
Considering how much time developers spend on the IDE—writing code while blasting their choice of music—the fact that they spend 3/4th of their time debugging would come as a shock to many.
Developers code, test, debug and test again until tests pass, in accordance with Test Driven Development or TDD. They are also fixing bugs found in staging (by QAs) or in production (by users). To do this, they need to be able to recreate the error in the environment (device/OS and browser) in which it was found.
And so, a lot of their time is spent switching between the IDE and the test environment. We created integrations that let you test on device/OS and browser combinations directly from your IDE.
Use our Visual Studio IDE. We have more coming up soon.
Build and scale a test automation library
QA managers are under constant pressure from the CTO to reduce the time-to-release. That's why automating repeatable tests is gaining steam.
Unfortunately, automation can be difficult for teams to adopt, for reasons such as:
- Majority of team members lacking programming know-how.
- Manual testers in the team who are still transitioning to test automation.
- A non-technical team like marketing, product, support, etc. contributing test cases.
With too many test cases and not enough scripts to automate them, quality is compromised. QA teams fall back to manual testing just to run through as many scenarios as they can before it is time to release.
Record and Playback tools a.k.a. codeless automation tools like Selenium IDE help solve this problem. They work by recording the manual interactions as code, which can later be run as scripts automatically. This way, non-programming members of your team can manually execute the steps of their test scenario, generate the code, and send it to QA for clean-up.
The trade-off here is a lack of real device context in the code generated by the tool. As a fix, BrowserStack provides integration with top Record and Playback Tools so you can build logical separation in your test library as you are building it. This gives you a seamless functional testing experience—and a visible improvement in your product's time to market.
Automate visual regression testing on real browsers and devices
Automated testing helps you test your entire functionality, but it can't report any visual discrepancies. GUI Testing a.k.a. visual regression testing is still a manual process of checking your webpages across different builds. The process is tedious, time-consuming and prone to error.
There are tools that can automate GUI testing. First, you define a baseline image for the page, which acts as the reference image for that page for all future checks. Going forward, the visual regression tool keeps taking screenshots and annotating areas where it finds pixel-mismatch or deviations from the baseline image.
But while visual regression tools help you find GUI discrepancies by builds, it doesn't provide visual regression across different browser and device combinations. Since each browser and device renders webpages in different manners, that blind spot can become glaring. BrowserStack integrates with top visual regression tools to take screenshots across 2000+ browser and device combinations. The screenshot taken in BrowserStack is used by the visual regression tool to find the UI Issues.
Endnote
As the number of tools in your workflow grows, so does the time you spend switching between them. Integrations simply 'bridge the gap', so to speak. They make your setup intuitive, so you don't have to stumble around, trying to find the details of a production bug that needs a fix at 3 in the morning.
Check out more ways to make your testing workflow simpler with Browserstack Integrations.
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