Chegg is an educational technology company with over 6.6 million subscribers worldwide and 7 offices across the globe. As the leading student-first connected learning platform, Chegg Student Hub aims to make higher education more affordable and accessible.
Chegg Student Hub Platform provides multiple services like Chegg study, tutoring, writing tools, math help, test prep, careers search, internships, college admissions, etc., across US and Canada. As the most essential platform for its ecosystem, Chegg Student Hub posed a unique challenge for the engineering productivity team. They had to ensure that all the platform applications inside Chegg, on which different product teams develop their products, work seamlessly and bug-free across browsers on multiple platforms like Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, etc.
BrowserStack helped tackle this challenge by providing automation testing at scale across combinations of real devices and browsers, ensuring Chegg’s platform works flawlessly for its diverse user base.
Conventionally, the engineering productivity team used an array of web drivers to test on different web browsers manually. The lack of automation drastically slowed the testing process, impacting delivery.
Chegg has students across USA and Canada using a range of devices, browsers, and OSes, including Windows, Mac, Androids, mobile phones, tablets, and more. The team had to ensure Chegg products were accessible to all their students, irrespective of the device-browser-OS they used. Speed and coverage, therefore, were important themes for the team to meet business objectives.
“We have to make sure our product is accessible across platforms. So it becomes a challenge if we do not have cross-browser testing [on a tool like BrowserStack],” explains Arpit Vadhera, Engineering Manager, Chegg Inc.
With a diverse user base and teams spread across geographies, test infrastructure offering real devices and a variety of browser-device-OS combinations was best suited for Chegg. Features such as parallel testing capabilities, logging, and local testing, encouraged the team to pick BrowserStack.
With BrowserStack, the team has been accomplishing its QA goals spectacularly.
The team integrates BrowserStack with their cross-platform, cross-browser automation tests, smoke tests, regression tests, etc. Different features are turned on and off at different stages to ensure everything works as intended across all user devices. This helps the team find and fix bugs early in the process, exponentially reducing the cost of fixing bugs.
The team now validates infrastructure and application-level test cases on real devices, which wasn’t possible on a simulator. “One of the benefits of using BrowserStack is their real device cloud. We can validate test cases on real devices to ensure that the features work in real time,” says Arpit.
With BrowserStack, the engineering productivity team at Chegg has achieved a high level of automation confidence. They now schedule builds in their CI/CD pipeline instead of waiting for the builds to be executed manually.
Engineers can also run the tests in parallel and focus on other requirements, such as automating the remaining part of the feature or looking for another non-functional requirement testing. As a result, the team saves time and resources, cutting costs and enabling scalability.
“The best part of using BrowserStack is 100% availability and uptime. We want to use plug-and-play technology that can be used whenever required from anywhere across the globe. We can target as many of our audiences as possible. Having this easy-to-implement setup [like BrowserStack] helps an organization a lot,” explains Arpit.
By testing on BrowserStack, the team at Chegg has unlocked multiple benefits on various fronts while also achieving newer milestones on their mission to help as many students as possible.
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