How DevOTT Can Transform the Mobile User Experience

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome to another tech strong segment here texturung TV. I'm happy to be joined.

He's a repeat. He's been on our show several times. His name is Marcus.

Merrill Marcus is with the good friends with sauce labs. And he's gonna we've got some exciting news coming out of soft Labs. Look for many of you who are out here watching you may have heard of Saw slabs.

A lot of people know they're deep deep expertise deep deep. Knowledge and selenium testing and stuff like that. You know testing today is Marcus is going to talk about is really grown the whole Q&A QA area.

And and sauces growing with it and Marcus. I don't want to take away his Thunder but he's gonna talk to us a little bit about this. Hey Marcus welcome.

Thank you. It's great to be here Alan. It's great.

Always great great to have you on and we should also mention. We pulled poor Marcus in off of family vacation in Las Vegas. So apologize 8:30 in the morning.

Nobody's awake. Exactly. Well.

Yeah Vegas is quiet that time of day. But you know apologies and thanks for taking time out Marcus. All right, so I you know, I kind of set the table for you.

How about it my friend? Cool. Well, first of all, I guess I should introduce myself those who haven't seen before.

I'm Marcus Merrill and vice president of Technology strategy here at Southlands, which is a weird title. I'm not in engineering. I don't actually have a team.

I'm an individual contributor. It's funny but my job is to sort of appraise the sauce Labs platform and then rely on my 20 years of quality assurance experience to sort of understand what it testers actually need from a company like us from a vendor like us and what are the gaps in the current offering that we have and how can we show those be either building a product partnering with another company that already does it or acquiring companies that can give us that that kind of space. So as you probably know over the past two years we've acquired four different companies that are helping us build out what we're calling the mobile devops test tool chain, which is kind of it's intended to be kind of an early to late shift left and right motion for being able to leave testing in throughout the soccer development life cycle.

So we now we used to be the company that offered selenium and Appian testing for desktop and mobile testing automated testing. Now, we offer manual testing for desktop. We offer emulator simulator in the in terms of the infrastructure and being able to run a device Farm without having to own all the devices and all that stuff.

But then we also have bought we've acquired a company that helps us to do app distribution as well as mobile open beta testing in the wild so that you can actually correlate what you're seeing in the field with what you're seeing in our lab environment. We've also acquired a company that helps us do API testing which allows you to basically feed an endpoint or a swag you're open apis back. It will generate a test set of test cases test Suites for you to be able to have confidence that your apis work and that also comes with mocking API endpoint mocking as well as contract testing.

So imagine now how many elements of the developer lifecycle are covered in a way that a single vendor Can give you data and Signal all across the lifestyle lifecycle to tell you here's where you may be missing something. Here's where you may have gaps. Here's where we believe you could be enhanced.

You can enhance your testing in your quality by looking at everything within you know, that that we'd noticed. I think it's kind of a first of its kind in the industry. There's kind of No Doubt to me that that's what it is because when I was in QA, this is the kind of software I would have killed to have all tied together under one procurement process one vendor one one area and that has been you know, what market so I'm not a QA professional you are.

But for as long as I've been in Tech in 30 years it always amazed me how many different facets how many different kinds of fasting one has to do to release software right or to release quality software? Yeah. And yeah, and there was no it's almost by definition.

You had multiple vendors that you had it, you know you were siled out for the different kinds of pets with different vendors. And I mean there was just no getting around it. I think I think the whole world would like to be able to have and I don't mean it in a bad way, but one throat to choke when it comes to my testing vendors, right, you know, and I because the other thing is moving moving through the the testing process and having to prepare your app for to work to get tested with using this tool and get tested using that tool for this and test for that on this.

So much easier if you had a true sweet if you will. Yeah, yeah. Let me make sure I got the name of this right so we're calling it.

mobile devops testing platform tool Chains Don't Change only because we still intended to be Loosely coupled pairing if you want to bring your own so we have application crash monitoring crash reporting. But if you want to integrate with another product to feed that into your pipeline, then we are platform should be able to support that just as well. If you have a different API testing product.

If you have a different way of running Cypress tests, we want to be able to plug all that data in our Series so we can't we're calling it a tool chain instead of a platform because you're not locked in on any given part. Got it. And and so it's still offering.

You know people the choice so it's it's I don't want to use the word open because open has all kinds of kind of tation about code and everything, but plugable a plugable tool chain. I love it now. yeah, soft slab solutions for a lot of the you know stops along this tool chain, or you could use you know, third parties as well and you guys partner with many of them to boot.

Yeah. Yeah, right. We have a good Partnerships with you know, eggplant and tricentis and and a lot of different companies that do in some cases even overlapping things where we might have a competitive place.

But we we are trying to partner with everyone because we believe we have something to offer all of these Partners in order to be able to plug into our platform and get good signal. Sure. Yeah, so How does this so?

Let's say I'm a soft slab user now, right? I've been doing mostly selenium testing using slots. How do I how do I get on board the tool chain here, right?

What's the migration process look like? Well, I mean my recommendation would be to find other people in your organization who are doing different kinds of testing from you and become you know, start talking to them about what are they into they're doing if they're if they're working on a microservice migration from a model of or even just a microservice by itself an API, then the tools for generating test Suites out of a swaggerdock or an open API spec are right there in our user interface. You can go with a few clicks the button and and stop and go from doing, you know, selenium test analysis to doing API testing right there.

So it's built in and I'd say I would say personally I'm such a fan of API testing and I always have been my entire career I would start there because to me that's where most of the business logic of the application happens. That's where you should really start in terms of you know, QA is about risk management more and more every day. What we're seeing is that our customers are telling us that QA is about risk management not about code coverage.

So API is primarily where you do your risk management testing whereas UI is UI testing should be reserved for testing to make sure that the user interface was coded properly to handle the signals from the API, which means you should be essentially doing a little less UI testing than you do API testing because API is where the business logic lives and the thing about us making a move into the space as thoughts Labs. Is that previously as a sort of selenium Appian house. Are only answer to you was to say well, you should probably do any more API testing.

But hey, let's let's get you doing more selenium testing for sure and now it allows us to be consultative and what I guess you'd say prescriptive to be able to say we're gonna now partner with you to figure out where your gaps and testing are all over and not just tell you to do more of one thing because that's happens to be how we make more money. So I love it personally as a tester because now I get to be fully honest and fully what I guess you'd say just just fully giving at the right kind of advice to people on how they can that not that I was being Sons before I mean that but yeah. I get what you mean Marcus you're good.

You don't have to don't have to say it. But here's another thing about it though too is and this isn't a one-person. Tool chain, right?

This is this is for an organization's entire testing almost their entire testing needs and strategy, right? This isn't just Marcus adopting it. This is every you know, the whole team using the tool change.

It's also good. yeah, I mean also the developers I mean now developers are you know heavily involved in writing API tests developers or primarily the folks that are writing Cypress and Puppeteer playwright Jessica pay tests. They're the ones who really enjoy writing sort of those.

I guess you'd say a better way less Black Box kinds of testing that do give you signal in which you should have, you know, all along the way we don't want to get caught up in the tyranny of or we want to be able to offer these things selenium and Cyprus and API testing. So so yeah, it's it's more than you based QA and developers and even in some cases product. So yeah.

We're good security is Marcus. So it's interesting security. There's there's something that that draw drew me to Sauce lives when I was in QA and I was in industry and I was on my fourth time of rebuilding a you know, an architecture test automation architecture and when sauce came polling I thought it was sort of unique opportunity to say, you know, there's a whole bunch of people that are running Millions hundreds of millions of Civilian tests every single year on this platform and shouldn't sauce Labs have the ability to sort of while you're doing a selenium test.

You've already pulled up the webpage. You've already hit the URL. You've already logged into the site shouldn't we be able to sort of do some scanning right?

Then like shouldn't we be able to sort of take what you've given us in parallel and say, you know, well, we're in here we're gonna test your site for security accessibility and performance. And now we are doing two of the three but happens to be the one that you mentioned that we're not doing quite yet. We're doing accessibility and performance alongside regular selenium testing.

You need to go through a couple of Hoops to get it enabled but it's literally a couple of lines of code in your framework, but security is one that we have prototype but not quite released where we're trying to integrate the open source zap proxy into our current desktop web scanning in order to be able to do security testing and give you a report alongside the testing that we're running. It's not released yet. It's not going to be ready to release maybe this year, but it's something that we're gonna try to do.

We are not gonna on the right company. On the horizon. We're not going to become a security company We're Not Gonna become an accessibility company, but we are partnering with companies who can help guide us in we integrate an open source tool to give you an early warning scan and tell you the big red flags.

And then we have a partner for you to call to get consent consultation and auditing when it comes to the real work of getting security testing done. I love it, you know look. Everything I'm here from you Marcus.

First of all, I like right I'm hearing good stuff. com since 2013-2014. So it's eight years eight nine years everything.

I'm here is that hey saw slabs is growing to be a full featured testing your full feature testing partner, right? It truly isn't just selenium. It's this whole tool chain.

And yes Security is coming. We're not saying we're gonna be the security Type Thing company will be partnering but we're here to really kind of we understand your testing needs and you're testing requirements and we're here to try to give you as a complete a solution said as we can even though it may not all be thoughts. You know IP but we're going to partner with the right people and and offer you what you need, which is a complete solution for testing for QA.

Yeah, and and one that offers I guess you'd say wisdom. Not just you know what for years every you know, every selenium test would run on any of these platforms would say green or red. Bye, you know, here's the logs.

Here's whatever what we're trying to do is pull actual actionable insights out if we see 300 tests fail, And 85 of them failed because of the same stack Trace. You should know that as a headline when you walk in in the morning. You shouldn't have to do that research yourself.

And that just think about all the different kinds of insights. We can give you based on the data that's already traversing our platform. That's what we're trying to do is yes, like you said we're trying to be a real partner.

It's kind of a cliche to say that our customers are Partners, but in this case like with for me, I mean, it's legitimate I go to my customer site. I feel like they are up here at mine. I don't feel like I'm trying to sell them something.

Love it, though. So Mark Skye ask a hard question though for you. And I don't even know you would know this because it's not really your wheelhouse but for customers who want to use the mobile devops testing tool chain.

How is it sold how you know, what's this gonna cost? Oh my gosh. Sorry.

He told me that it's around. I just knock my lights up. It happens.

Right? I don't have I definitely don't have pricing. That's the kind of thing.

We have an Enterprise sales motion and that's kind of how we operate and I'm not I'm not honestly part of it. I'm still on the kind of the vision and put this thing together side how how it sold is is we you generally you know, you you contact someone at the company and then we try to really go in and do Discovery find out what you actually need. And if you already have something that that we would duplicate We're not gonna try to replace it.

We're just gonna try to work with it. Make sure how we can figure out how to plug it in stuff. And so we're going to with I think that the basic building blocks of a mobile devops test tool chain implementation would be API testing.

Then mobile automated and live manual testing via the real device Cloud, which would be either public devices or private devices spinning on your needs. And then it we would we would talk about distribution where you know, a lot of Dev teams have to deal with app center and test flight and all these really difficult to use tools made by Google and apple we have our test fairy tool which sort of combines all of that and makes it super easy to distribute your apps to select few beta testers or to the public with an instrument app that will allow you to report bugs easily back platform and then you tie all of this signal together by releasing it with back trades, which is our crash error monitoring tool which means that you're in production and you're seeing stack traces and correlating signals and indexing them and sending them back to the developers within minutes of release rather than having to wait for a Reddit post from some angry gamer something like that. And so you're covered from API all the way through automated testing in the lab all the way through beta testing in the real world all the way through crash and air reporting in production your shifted left you shifted right and you've tied a whole feedback loops together with all signal that we've got that's the guy protected by the only only testing industry that does have ISO 27,000 a one twenty seven.

Oh one and sock 2001 right certification. Yeah, that's right. So we got all the security compliances to mean that your data is safe.

I love it markets. Hey, you know what? Sauce Labs?

com. That's right, right. All right, my friends, right?

Hey, enjoy the rest of your vacation. I'm sure I'm sorry to pull you out in the middle, but hopefully the family still asleep. They didn't miss you.

I hope to see you soon. Oh, well, I'll stay as well. For now, though go to Soy slabs.

Check out this new mobile devops testing tool chain and Marcus. Thanks very much. com.

We'll be right back.