Why Automate your Cross Browser Testing in Continuous Delivery
When you have a web dependent business, it is important to make sure that your website runs on every type of environment as intended. And if you also have a mobile dependent business, then you need to ensure that it runs on both web and mobile devices efficiently as desired.
Cross Browser Testing is done to check for application compatibility not just across different browsers but devices, different screen resolutions, and operating systems. This will help expand the business and reach a bigger audience.
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Why Cross Browser Testing?
Applications perform differently for many reasons mainly due to the code interpretation differences of the rendering engines(different browsers compete using different rendering engines and keep updating them to stay ahead of the competition). Developers are compelled to write different code to suit different browsers.
The primary job of a browser engine is to transform HTML code, CSS and other resources of a web page into an interactive visual representation on a user’s device.
You may refer to a simple but detailed explanation of how browsers work.
Chrome that has the largest user activity uses Blink as its rendering engine, Safari uses WebKit, Internet Explorer uses Trident, Firefox uses Gecko and many more. Though each browser follows a standard, they are not all the same.
The application you build may appear differently or may not appear at all following a feature update on a browser. That’s why you should check how an application performs across browsers especially when you are building a responsive application.
Every time you run your build process on different cross browsers and device/OS/browser configurations and by running them in parallel, you can be confident that a particular build ran on a number of device combinations in just a fraction of time.
Why automate your Cross Browser Testing in Continuous Delivery?
With the growing number of devices, ensuring that a feature works in every browser is a must. It is not just sufficient to test an application on a couple of popular browsers and assume it would work on others too. In today’s competitive market, there’s no room to push one’s luck.
It is a must to test on all possible combinations and that’s when Cross Browser Testing becomes important to meet today’s Agile and Continuous Delivery requirements.
If you are following Agile and Continuous delivery practices that well suits today’s continuous delivery requirements where the release cycles are very short and often, you cannot afford to test the same functionality over and again manually across different test environments.
Manual Testing can be a bottleneck eventually which requires tremendous testing effort. To ensure faster, continuous delivery of quality software with lesser ROI payback time, Manual Testing is not enough. Refer ‘Is Manual Testing becoming a bottleneck in your Continuous Delivery?’
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Hence Automate your Cross Browser Testing.
An effective Automated Testing ensures an effective continuous delivery process in Agile.
Let’s look at a few major benefits of automating testing in Continuous Delivery:
- Achieve Quality at Speed
- Continuously integrate and continuously test
- Closely aligned with business requirements
- Quick actionable feedback
- Create automated reusable tests
- Shift Left Testing
- Repetitive testing ensures quality
- Automatically deploy code with confidence
- Faster time to market
We know that with Automated Testing, once the automated test is written, we can re-run the same across many different browser environments effortlessly. Even then there is a retreat in automated testing even today. This is discussed more in detail in the article, Is Manual Testing becoming a bottleneck in your Continuous Delivery?
A good automation testing tool with an in-built Test Environment and support for multiple device/OS/browsers and end user devices will ease out this process.
8 Essential elements for Automated Cross Browser Testing Tools explains a few important elements that make Cross Browser Testing effortless and effective. A good Automated Cross Browser Testing tool will help you test an application continuously on multiple browser environments and proceed quickly in the continuous delivery pipeline.
Cloud based Automated Cross Browser Testing Tools
Coordinating, maintaining multiple browsers and devices and scaling them depending on project requirements is cost intensive. With cloud based automation testing, you can perform tests on thousands of real devices available on the cloud and automate test flows across varying devices, platforms, browsers and its versions.
It is easy to optimize applications for each device and its versions with the cloud. Hence Cloud based Automated Cross Browser Testing tools better fit the Continuous Testing requirements.
Also, builds committed by developers can be continuously tested in parallel on a wide range of browsers available on the cloud which ensures better test coverage in less time and provides quick actionable feedback.
Refer more to know about the Advantages of Cloud Based Cross Browser Testing Tools.
When software development teams are constantly integrating, the best approach would be Continuous Testing where QA teams can keep up with the constantly changing features, frequent integrations, and fast workflows. If a code is working properly in one browser, it may not render the same in others. It is important that the automated cross browser testing tool continuously verifies every code integrations on multiple browsers to ensure every integration is met with parallel testing across browsers.
For a detailed article on Continuous Testing and on extending automated testing towards Continuous Testing, refer Continuous Testing at the Speed of Agile and DevOps.
With an automated cross browser testing tool like Testsigma, you can be confident that your test ran across thousands of configurations in parallel. With access to over 1000 browsers, operating systems, and mobile devices, Testsigma lets you test your easily written tests on multiple device/browser combinations effortlessly and offers easy integrations with CI/CD tools.
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Try Testsigma, an end to end Cross Browser Testing tool to write your tests using simple English and run tests in a massive number of test environments in the cloud.
Check out how Testsigma integrates Jenkins into the continuous delivery pipeline.
