Can you release your application by only verifying its performance on one browser? No? This is because you can never anticipate which browser your end users will be using to access your app. This is exactly the reason why cross-browser testing is one of the major parameters of the modern app testing cycle. LambdaTest is one such application that helps you perform automated cross-browser testing through its cloud platform.
Unfamiliar with LambdaTest? Don’t worry! We are here for you. Our article will help you understand how to implement LambdaTest for enterprise-grade cross-browser testing. We will also help you understand how you can integrate LambdaTest with your existing development, testing, and deployment workflow.
What Is Enterprise Cross-Browser Testing
Before we dive into the LambdaTest implementation process, we must have a clear understanding of the basics of enterprise cross-browser testing and its importance in the modern application development and testing cycle. To shed more light over this segment, we have mentioned all the major factors that justify the importance of enterprise cross-browser testing:
- Enterprises usually serve huge global audiences who have a broad spectrum of browsers and devices. These browsers can range all the way from legacy Internet Explorer versions to the latest mobile browsers.
- You must be aware that a small rendering issue or functionality glitch will be a highly critical factor that can degrade your business and lead to a loss of revenue. It will also play an important role in damaging the brand reputation to diminish the customer trust.
- You will see that larger organizations usually have monolithic or microservices-based architectures, integrate front-end frameworks, and multiple third-party integrations. So, the implementation of all these factors will further increase the risk of browser-specific bugs.
- Finally, modern enterprises have adopted rapid release cycles, which demand that testing occurs at the earlier phases of the development cycle and also frequently. You also have to implement the testing processes across multiple environment cycles. In these scenarios, automated cross-browser testing with efficient tools becomes the only possible solution to keep up with the speed.
Why LambdaTest For Enterprises
Now, you might ask that since there are multiple different cloud-based platforms easily available in the market, why should we choose LambdaTest for enterprise cross-browser testing. To begin with, LambdaTest is an AI-native test orchestration and execution platform that lets you perform manual and automation testing at scale with over 5000 real devices, browsers, and OS combinations.
To shed more light over this decision, let us go through some of the additional factors that justify the use of LambdaTest for enterprise solutions:
- LambdaTest allows you to implement enterprise-scale concurrency so that you can run thousands of different testing scenarios at the same time. This application will help you to massively reduce the overall test execution time and also improve the resource consumption for the application.
- Since artificial intelligence and machine learning have been completely dominating the current testing infrastructure, LambdaTest will allow you to implement AI test automation. Some of the important features in this regard include predictive test case generation and AI-based test result analysis
- Since LambdaTest has a huge real device farm and also multiple virtual environments, the teams can thoroughly test the compatibility of their application on a huge range of operating systems. This device farm also provides access to multiple legacy devices and outdated browser versions. Moreover, since it’s entirely cloud-based, you can access this device farm from anywhere in the world.
- You can easily integrate LambdaTest with popular continuous integration and continuous deployment tools like Jenkins, Circle CI, and GitHub actions. It is also very simple to integrate LambdaTest with project management tools like Jira and communication platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams.
- The entire platform of LambdaTest meets strict security standards and also offers Single Sign On(SSO), Data encryption, private device clouds, and also complies with regulations like GDPR and SoC2.
- Other than allowing you to implement basic cross-browser tests, it also offers local testing, visual regression, integrated debugging, and advanced analytics. All these testing options will help you serve enterprises which are looking to optimize their quality assurance processes.
Based on all the factors mentioned above, we can easily summarize that choosing LambdaTest will help to ensure that your enterprise’s QA strategy is future-proof, easily scalable, and capable of handling complex and high-volume testing scenarios.
Planning Your Cross-Browser Testing Strategy
Let us now divert our attention towards some other major factors that you must consider to properly plan your cross-browser testing strategy for enterprises with LambdaTest:
- You must begin the process by examining your user analytics data. This data will help you identify the most widely used platforms, browsers, and devices within your target ecosystem. Based on this data, you can easily create your target devices and browser lists to implement the cross-browser testing process.
- You must remember that not all features of your application are equally important for its stable functioning. So, you must prioritize the most important features like payment, authentication, high-traffic pages, and others.
- You must start testing in the earliest possible stages of the development cycle. This is because continuous testing from development to production will help you ensure that browser-specific issues are caught swiftly and removed before they can turn into a serious concern.
- It is important to create a healthy balance between manual testing and automation testing. Manual testing will benefit test cases like exploratory testing, while automation testing will be a boon for repetitive testing scenarios like regression testing.
- You must ensure that your tests are stable, well-documented, and modular. This is because flaky tests will add noise and also slow down the overall testing pipeline.
- One of the biggest advantages of using a cloud-based testing platform like LambdaTest is the integration of parallel testing. Using this feature, you can run multiple testing scenarios on different configurations at the same time.
- Finally, you must integrate your cross-browser tests within the continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines so that you can continuously validate the functioning and stability of the application after every code commit.
Setting Up LambdaTest for Enterprise
Now that we have finished discussing the basics of LambdaTest and enterprise solution, along with the test planning strategy, we can move on towards setting up LambdaTest for executing the test cases. To help the new testers with this process, we have mentioned all the required steps in this segment in the intended order:
- If you are an enterprise user, your first step here would be to set up your main organization and team structures within LambdaTest. After subscribing to the enterprise plan, you can create your organization, invite the relevant team members, and initiate Single Sign On using providers like OneLogin.
- With the growing team structure, you might need to handle multiple projects. So, you must create dedicated projects under your LambdaTest organization. Each client will represent a product or a microservice. This will be highly critical to keep track of all the projects without being confused.
- With LambdaTest, you can initiate automation testing with multiple frameworks like Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, and many more. So, you have to choose your desired platform and implement the required configuration steps. To put more light over this segment, we have mentioned the intended code snippets if you chose Selenium:
- Installing required Dependencies
- Configuring Credentials
- Creating The WebDriver Session
- The final step in this process is to run your test scripts and run them locally first. The LambdaTest dashboard will help you visualize the test execution process in real-time.
The steps for Selenium are almost similar to other automation frameworks. The only major difference is that you will have to install the relevant LambdaTest plugin or set the environment variables according to your choice.
Advanced Debugging and Troubleshooting
Let’s be honest: while implementing automation testing, it is common to come across various bugs and errors. While working with LambdaTest, you will have access to various features to assist you in this regard:
- LambdaTest has comprehensive test reports with screenshots and videos. These multimedia elements will help you to find the faulty functions and implement the necessary steps.
- LambdaTest uses console logs and network logs to pinpoint JavaScript errors, warnings, or deprecation notices.
- You can also use LambdaTest’s automated screenshot feature to implement quick visual validation across multiple browsers.
- You can also use LambdaTest live interactive testing whenever a test fails, you encounter unusual behavior, or there is a general error with the testing scenario. This tool will help you manually control a virtual machine or real device session. This feature will be highly essential to replicate the problem and understand its root cause.
Performance Optimization and Best Practices
As an enterprise, you will be running thousands of different tests daily. So, in such a scenario, performance and cost optimization will be one of the most important factors. Below, we have mentioned some of the best practices that can help you achieve this goal:
- You must combine multiple verifications into a single testing session if they share the same initial setup. This is one of the most important steps to achieve an efficient test design phase.
- It is also important to create small and independent tests compared to creating a few large monolithic test scenarios. This implementation will help you to implement parallel testing and also perform easy debugging after the test execution.
- We suggest the testers to use mocks or stubs for external services wherever applicable. This approach will help you prevent the system from stalling due to slow or unreliable third-party APIs.
- Finally, you must automate tests like fetching test results, controlling concurrency, or uploading build status programmatically. This is one of the most effective uses of LambdaTest’s native APIs.
The Bottom Line
Based on all the factors that we have put forward in this article, we can easily say that cross-browser testing is a very important parameter from an enterprise context, as it will have a very important role in ensuring product quality, user satisfaction, and market competitiveness. LambdaTest will be an essential tool to implement this goal as it will offer a secure, scalable, and comprehensive cross-browser testing ecosystem.
By implementing all the testing strategies that we have mentioned in this article, you can utilize the benefits of rapid feedback and robust QA processes that are offered by the LambdaTest platform. Finally, we can easily say that an advanced cross-browser testing strategy through LambdaTest will be the backbone of your product’s reliability and success.