UNiDAYS tests at scale with BrowserStack

UNiDAYS is the market-leading digital identity verification provider. UNiDAYS marketplace helps over 26 million students and graduates save millions of dollars on products and services from over 800 brands across 115 markets. Their vision is to support, enable, and inspire young people to be their best selves, building an enduring proposition that will benefit new generations.To achieve this goal, they needed a robust and scalable test infrastructure that ensured a uniform customer experience across devices and geographies.

They struggled with testing their applications on a range of devices with diverse form factors and varied OS-browser combinations. While scaling up their operations, they had to keep a check on the cost of procuring and maintaining the devices.

UNiDAYS partnered with BrowserStack to tap into a reliable cloud-based test infrastructure that could handle the scale they envisioned. BrowserStack resolved the challenges of device coverage, location-based testing, and test suite automation. Additionally, a state-of-the-art test monitoring system ensured that their applications were bug-free every time.

With the ever-increasing student population across geographies, UNiDAYS needed to keep up with its exponential growth. Prabhu Maniraj, Head of QA at UNiDAYS, felt the need to set up a brand new QA function that would test their solutions across the regions from where they operated. “We need to ensure that our features work seamlessly in all geographies. However, sending QA teams to test at physical locations was not cost-effective,” says Prabhu.

Another major challenge appeared in the form of device procurement. The developers at UNiDAYS wanted to test across devices and browsers-OS combinations. However, the cost of procuring and maintaining the real device infrastructure was a mammoth task.

To be prepared for their scaling endeavors, the QA team was setting up the automation framework that would run across multiple browsers and regions. This created a need for a solution that supports their automation initiatives. They evaluated multiple solutions and partnered with BrowserStack.

BrowserStack Live and App Live are used by the developers and the QA team at UNiDAYS whenever a new component is designed. While testing the web front end, they test it across various OS and browser combinations. The responsive web design (RWD) is tested across various devices. “We use BrowserStack to test our applications on real devices specifically, without worrying about the costs of procuring and maintaining the devices,” says Prabhu.

UNiDAYS used BrowserStack’s location-based testing feature to ensure their application works perfectly across geographically diverse markets. For example, to test a new feature on a browser in a specific region, the QA team used BrowserStack Live and selected the necessary regions from the list. The preloaded URL made this task easy, avoiding extra steps.

To further optimize their testing process, UNiDAYS decided to develop an automated test suite using BrowserStack AppAutomate to run iOS and Android releases.

After implementing BrowserStack, UNiDAYS estimated to reduce their testing time from two to three business days to a few hours while ensuring that all the checklists are validated.

With BrowserStack’s cloud-based real device test infrastructure, they achieved faster delivery times. The availability of an extensive range of physical devices solved the issue of device coverage. “Without BrowserStack, we might not be able to cover all the device form factors in the time that is needed before we submit the apps to the App Store and make the feature available to our customers,” explained Prabhu.

Additionally, BrowserStack dashboards and console logs provided the QA team at UNiDAYS with insights into the performance of their test automation suite, ensuring all the bugs were detected. BrowserStack support team helped UNiDAYS resolve their unique challenges by providing tailor-made solutions for specific needs and situations.

The ease of setting up and using BrowserStack helped the developers use it out of the box. Due to quick deployment, UNiDAYS considered exposing product design, marketing, and sales teams to BrowserStack products.

Being satisfied with BrowserStack’s solutions, Prabhu lauded the efforts of the support teams. “The BrowserStack’s support team is really proactive, listening, adaptable, and approachable and always on hand to help resolve any challenges or questions that we may have,” says Prabhu.