Offload the test server maintenance = less headaches
February 21, 2017
Offload the test server maintenance = less headaches
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Sauce Labs
We use Sauce Labs to run our Selenium tests in parallel. We used to run our own servers for this purpose, but Sauce Labs allows us to run tests across many more browsers in many environments without the headaches of maintaining servers. Sauce Labs also makes increasing our thread count trivial.
- Running tests on various environments. I can easily run a server with a specific browser on my own. But if I want my test to run on Windows, Mac or Linux and against Firefox, IE, Chrome and Safari (not to mention the various versions of each OS and browser that I care about), then there's no contest. Sauce Labs makes my life much easier!
- On demand manual environments are great. If I need to test a feature on my site on a particular OS or browser, it's a lot quicker to navigate to Sauce Labs and fire up the environment than to find someone with that OS or download another version of that browser. Not to mention IE only likes to have 1 version installed, so I get to maintain a set of virtual environments (and have you ever noticed Microsoft's virtual environments expire every 6 months, so you have to start fresh? What a pain...
- Running my tests in parallel is particularly easy with Sauce Labs. Trying to run even 5 tests on my machine slows everything down so much that I can't do anything else while they run. But if I send those tests off to Sauce Labs, there's no noticeable drain on my local resources. Plus I can run a lot more than 5 tests without worrying about them competing for resources.
- I was overly optimistic with my usage when setting up our agreement. I wish I could see some sort of kickback with my ultra low usage compared to what I'm paying for.
- I noticed my dashboard likes to show how many threads I'm using. I'd much rather see how many are being used on our account in total. That'd help me decide if I should use 50 or more threads, or maybe I should use a smaller amount right now.
- Down time seems to be better in the past year compared to the year before (unexpected outages, maintenance windows, etc), but there's always room for improvement.