ELEKS partners with BrowserStack to implement automation testing

Working with a team spread across multiple geographical locations, ensuring the availability of devices for testing became a challenge for ELEKS. Providing physical devices to every tester was impractical due to the high cost of procurement and maintenance of the devices as the testing team at ELEKS needed a variety of devices, that included both android and iOS devices, to deliver consistent results.

Ostap Elyashevskyy, competence manager of quality assurance at ELEKS, took the responsibility of finding the right testing partner for the organization. In his journey, he identified multiple challenges pertaining to setting up an internal device farm. The first impediment was procuring the devices and ensuring they were made available to the testers as soon as they were launched. “It would probably take months to procure new devices, like iPhone 14 device, and make it available for testing, the speed and the flexibility were very critical criteria for us,” says Ostap.

The next big challenge was maintaining the available devices. Even with their in-house IT department, maintenance, and support slowed the testing process. Hence they wanted a solution that ensured access to multiple android and iOS devices at all times. Being familiar with BrowserStack due to usage at a smaller scale, the testing team at ELEKS chose BrowserStack as their testing partner.

BrowserStack provided ELEKS with a reliable testing infrastructure consisting of more than 3000 real mobile devices spread across 19 global data centers accessible through the cloud. Thus ensuring the availability of devices for testing without the hassles of procurement and maintenance. “We just open the browser and select the device we would like to use for testing, and everything works just in a few minutes. There is no need to wait [for available devices] anymore,” says Ostap.

With BrowserStack’s enterprise plan, they were able to integrate the testing infrastructure with their active directory. This enabled testers to use the SSO (single sign-on) functionality and use the corporate credentials to access BrowserStack, thus ensuring high security.

With BrowserStack, testers at ELEKS achieved higher levels of test automation. The ability to monitor application logs and check for error messages instantly in the browser played an important role in the process of implementing test automation. In addition to this, BrowserStack allows them to test applications that run locally and are not released to the public. In addition to enabling test automation, BrowserStack has helped ELEKS improve its CI/CD pipeline. “BrowserStack can be integrated with the CI/CD system. This has enabled us to run the tests remotely and integrated with our CI/CD pipelines,” says Ostap.

BrowserStack has also empowered the testers at ELEKS with features like image injection, TalkBack, and VoiceOver to perform accessibility testing for niche projects. These unique features paired with ease of use made BrowserStack the perfect testing partner for ELEKS. “BrowserStack is a plug-and-play solution that saves us time as there is no need to go through learning programs, tons of reading material, and documents,” says Ostap.

With BrowserStack’s integration with Jira, testing teams at ELEKS can manage available testing resources judiciously. “If our employee wants to use or request a device on BrowserStack, they create a ticket and after that, we check if we have physical devices available and provide them with the device. If we don’t have a physical device, we add the user to the BrowserStack active directory group to provide immediate access within minutes,” explains Ostap.

Talking about their experience with the BrowserStack team, Ostap says, “BrowserStack team is quick and responsive in providing support and answering queries with proper documentation and resources.”