Sauce Labs is a cloud-based platform
for automated testing of desktop and mobile applications. It is designed to be instantly scalable, since it is optimized for continuous
integration workflows. (The vendor says that when tests are automated and run in parallel on
multiple virtual machines across many different browser, platform and device
combinations, testing time is reduced and developer time is freed up from
managing infrastructure.) The Sauce Labs testing cloud is intended to be paired…
I initially went with Sauce Labs due to a reason that no longer exists: access to specific public real devices without having to wait because there's only one of that device. While it's a bummer things changed, with the offering of their dynamic allocation, I'm able to get a …
Having used some of the competitor's tools over the year I would say that SauceLabs provides a lot of value for money if you plan to run long sets of tests with high frequencies. Paying for a single slot means you can run tests whenever you want without creeping costs but it does make running tests in parallel require an extra slot. Currently, our test suite takes over three hours to run and at the moment it is cost prohibitive to purchase an extra slot. However, having access to live testing and integration with Appium is great.
If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and effort from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, Windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done.
Xamarin allows you to write cross platform code. This allows companies to build apps more quickly by writing less code. Having code abstracted and reused across multiple platforms allows for more testing and less issues overall.
The ability to use Visual Studio is a huge plus. Visual Studio is one of the best IDE's available and being able to write cross platforms apps while in a great IDE makes everything less painful.
Xamarin is now free with a large company backing. This means that bugs on the platform get fixed more quickly and there is a large community of developers.
I've had four changes in account managers over the past couple of years. They ranged from super experienced/advocate to some that seems relatively junior/a bit removed. I understand this happens but clarity on what I can expect with these partnerships would be valuable. What I've gotten in the end has varied dramatically.
As we currently know, there's nothing on the market with a big feature set like saucelabs at their current price point. Along with the business not having to learn a whole new tool to use again and the ability to refresh our private devices and the continuously growing number of public devices available and features.
Xamarin has been great for developing different projects efficiently and effectively. It's nice to reuse the core business logic across different platforms so that there are less to maintain and little replications are needed. The biggest benefit is that C# programmers do not have to learn a different language to do mobile development.
It is an incredibly easy service to use for what its primary intention is. The only reason a point is deducted is because more feature enrichment can be done around the Sauce Connect Proxy utility and the Jenkins Sauce OnDemand plugin. User Account administration also needs more work, such as the addition of user groups, rather than a simple hierarchy of users.
If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and efforts from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done
Yes, Sauce labs is always there, and it is easy to troubleshoot when you are having any connectivity issue, they always keep you informed when they plan to perform any type of maintenance window on their side in advance, so you can plan and will not affect your current work. I do not recall any outage.
The time where they acquired TestObject and were trying to integrate their services would probably be the most annoying time. Annoying as features were in two separate places (websites) for example. But since the introduction of their unified platform, we haven't run into any issues as of yet and we've used them for at least 5-6 years now.
The people here are just so friendly and personable. For instance, Tristan Lombard answered every single email with a very cheery tone and not only did he diagnose my issue, he also made sure to ask how my day was going. Keep it up
I never had to contact support for any help. Most of the problems we ran into, we were able to identify and use peer support through blogs and other internet sources to resolve the problems. There are plenty of sources online which provide tutorials, discuss problems, etc. Example: StackOverflow
I am not sure if it's my company that makes getting Sauce Labs integrated into the team difficult or is it Sauce Labs. The process for getting Sauce Labs for a project is quite a tedious process and the information for using Sauce Labs initially is quite lacking. There is little support for getting started
Just with any programming tasks, have a plan first. Design out the system, spend time to build it correctly the first time and have plenty of testing and user acceptance opportunities. Xamarin was easy to implement for a C# programmer. However, you need to do tutorials to realize the platform's capabilities.
We have also tested out Browser Stack, which at the time was more geared towards manual testing. Although it appeared to support more mobile devices/browsers, we also wanted something that can plugin in easily with our existing Selenium test scripts. Sauce Labs was definitely more geared towards our goals at the moment which were to automation functional/regression testing and build it into our release pipeline.
Xamarin runs natively on MacOS, and the debugger and other integration and auto-complete tools are far better than Eclipse for C# .NET. It also carries much of the plugin/add-on capabilities that are so desirable on Atom. Eclipse is a better for generalized software development, provided a developer is comfortable switching between the IDE the command line for certain parts of their workflow, like building, package management, or debugging. But for C# .NET development on MacOS specifically, Xamarin is the best product I've used for the job.
With private devices, you have full reign over usage of them, so no complaints there. Public devices are available if no one else is using it, which is understandable. Browser VMs are based on number of open sessions and Saucelabs give you a certain number depending on what you need. If you need more, then you pay for more. It is as simple as that. You need more devices, then you can pay for more private ones too. A workaround for public devices is to pick the first available one and not be too picky, that's if you are able to of course.
