Visma offers software and services that simplify and digitize core business processes in the private and public sectors. The company develops mission-critical software in accounting, ERP, and financial management. With 15,000 employees, 1,135,000 customers, and net revenue of €1,995 million in 2021, Visma is one of Europe’s leading software companies.
In the fast-paced and fragmented market, Visma’s service delivery teams encountered numerous challenges in managing their on-premise testing infrastructure of mobile devices. They aimed to improve the availability of real devices to testers. With BrowserStack, they successfully reduced setup and teardown times for mobile devices and browsers, improving product delivery lead times while upholding quality standards for their end customers.
Initially, service delivery teams bought the latest and most used phone models on the market. They also operated and maintained many browsers and their multiple versions on several different setups to replicate customers’ usage. “Mobile phones come out very quickly, and there are a number of them, [so] it becomes quite expensive to keep up with the speed of the technology,” says Mili Orucevic, Chief Software Quality Engineer at Visma.
Engineers spent a lot of time preparing the devices before actual tests because they didn’t want a false positive or a false negative outcome. Thorough cleanups were also required after each test as it was never known what was already installed.
“It was probably fine when we had the iPhone 4; the next iPhone was a couple of years away. But when the test matrix grew, and devices were fragmented in the market, with us needing to cover all the devices, it all became just unmaintainable,” says Mili.
The main criterion for choosing a testing tool was the capability to test on real devices. Mili narrates, “Over the years, I have seen that many times when we test on an emulator, we get positive feedback. But when we release the product into the market, customer feedback is the opposite – they would say ‘this doesn’t work on my phone’.”
Additionally, service delivery teams wanted to test on multiple real browser-device combinations remotely with minimum latency between setting up the test environment, starting the tests, and getting back the results of the tests.
To fulfill these critical criteria, they embarked upon their quest to find the perfect testing solution with ten different vendors; one of these candidates was BrowserStack. They then performed the same set of testing and setups for all the vendors and chose BrowserStack as it best suited all their criteria. “BrowserStack was the fastest one in the performance checks we did,” says Mili.
Today, Visma’s tests run parallelly on different browsers and mobile devices on BrowserStack. “BrowserStack saves substantial time for Visma’s service delivery teams compared to sequentially running the tests in the local lab,” says Mili.
“The advantage of using BrowserStack is that you can run the same test on multiple devices. This helps us achieve more coverage, and as we can run tests in parallel, it helps us also improve our delivery lead time.”
Doubling down on BrowserStack’s benefits, Alin Groza, Principal Test Engineer at Visma adds, “The UI automated testing framework using BrowserStack is our daily safety net. BrowserStack enables the framework to be a cross-platform solution and helps us discover malfunctioning code as early as possible. This increases the development team’s productivity, leading to faster release cycles.”
Commending the level of support BrowserStack provides, Mili says, “Instead of going through a lot of hoops, a lot of emails, support requests, etc., we also have this option where we are in direct contact with BrowserStack [via Slack]. We also have bi-weekly meetings with each other to check in on how things are going, and [BrowserStack] always asks if there are specific teams that need more hands-on help.”
“We are working on continuous delivery and DevOps mindset in Visma. We are pushing things into production daily. With BrowserStack, we get everything that we need when we need it to move forward, fast,” says Mili.
With ever-changing technology in AI, ML & Quantum computing, Visma’s service delivery teams aspire to leverage BrowserStack in creating better products and delivering maximum value to their customers.
Read Alin Groza’s 3-part article series on Automated UI Testing:
Framework Development and Integration
*Testing minutes mentioned are for the period of January to October 2022
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