Q2 improves trust in test automation with BrowserStack's reliable, stable and scalable cloud

Given its large and diverse user base, Q2 must test its online banking application thoroughly to catch issues before they disrupt customer experience. “BrowserStack has been helpful for us to scale our tests and catch issues before we release our products,” says Vidya Sundararaman, QA strategist for front-end applications, Q2 E-banking.

Before using BrowserStack, Q2 used another platform for mobile testing and automation. However, platform stability issues forced them to look for a better, more reliable partner to scale testing. “We were looking for reliability, scalability, and efficiency when running our tests, and an easy-to-use platform for manual and automated testing to increase our test coverage on very focused mobile features like biometrics and image capture,” explains Vidya.

Q2 was already using BrowserStack for browser testing, so the team thought ‘sticking with one product for all our testing would be a good idea’. Today, Q2 uses BrowserStack for manual and automated mobile testing too.

“Twelve teams currently use Browserstack at Q2, including design, support, branding, and others. But our front-end online banking application team is the biggest group using BrowserStack,” says Vidya. “Especially during the pandemic, teams working remotely from across the globe are able to test on BrowserStack without any problems with accessing devices. Now everybody can test our mobile app, which was not possible before BrowserStack,” she adds.

Live and App Live are widely used across support and customer experience teams at Q2 to reproduce issues on specific browser-OS-device combinations. They also extensively use debugging tools, device and network logs, reporting, etc. Automate and App Automate, on the other hand, are used for running nightly and weekly regressions, helping the team to scale testing and improve coverage.

The team has mobile releases every month, while their online banking application releases happen every two weeks. “The number of bugs caught by automation has increased drastically after we moved to Browserstack because the platform is very stable. And when tests fail, it is very deterministic. We are able to debug and undercover issues in our product that we couldn’t have caught with manual testing. We save at least two days’ effort by two manual QAs by running the same tests on BrowserStack. We save about $2500 per release, which amounts to an annual cost of about $31000.”

“With BrowserStack, we get stable results. We run 30 tests on 4 versions of iOS and 4 of Android. Because we have been running our mobile tests on a wide variety of device and OS combinations on a nightly and weekly basis, we have caught issues before release and done hotfixes. We are able to catch regression issues that weren’t possible before unless we repeatedly did manual testing on our regression builds,” says Vidya.

BrowserStack is especially beneficial when it comes to catching issues with new OS versions. “BrowserStack always has beta versions of new OSes, so we are able to get them tested early by our devs and include them in our automation runs. Physically getting the latest device and OSes in the market is not always easy, but on BrowserStack, they are already available to us.”

BrowserStack’s customer support team worked with Q2 to help with tests dependent on mobile-specific features like biometrics, image capture, etc. “There are a lot of new features we are working on for our mobile app, so we are definitely going to scale our tests and see how to test those features on BrowserStack and automate them,” Vidya explains.