US-based technology startup LambdaTest is a next-gen testing orchestration platform that allows users to run both manual and automated tests of web and mobile apps across 3,000+ different browsers, browser versions, and operating system environments. Today, over 500 enterprises and 600,000+ users across 130+ countries rely on LambdaTest for their test execution needs.
How LambdaTest helps developers
Noticing the pressure developers and QA teams face to test and ship their code faster, Asad Khan and Jay Singh founded the company in 2017. As customer experience is king, companies are increasingly going digital, innovating, and releasing features a lot faster. But there is a lack of efficient testing infrastructure that has browsers (and their multiple versions), operating systems (and their multiple versions), and real devices. “More often than not, businesses cannot determine or control the browsers, operating systems or devices that their customers use. Therefore, it is essential that they conduct tests in real user conditions,” says Jay.
It is important to test the software on different devices to ensure that the product is compatible, reliable, and responsive. But setting up an on-premise platform isn’t easy, neither is maintaining them in-house – it is time consuming and expensive. Poor infrastructure results in high test execution time, flakiness, which, in turn, leads to delayed developer feedback and delay in release cycles.
“LambdaTest is a next-gen testing orchestration platform that is extremely fast and offers least flakiness when compared to other platform providers products in the market. It is built on the latest tech stack and allows users to execute tests faster. Our pricing is affordable and we offer integration with industry leading project management, time management, and CI/CD tools. We want our users to focus on just writing the tests and we take care of the execution of those tests,” Jay says.
Currently, the team has six different product lines – cross browser manual, cross browser automation, native app testing, real device testing, visual testing, HyperTest, and Test at Scale (TAS). HyperTest, launched last year, is a next-gen smart testing platform to help businesses run end-to-end Selenium tests at the fastest speed possible. It is up to 70 percent faster than any traditional cloud-based Selenium Grid, while TAS is LambdaTest’s test intelligence platform. With TAS, businesses can accelerate their whole pipeline from development to release, get faster feedback on code changes, manage flaky tests, and keep master green.
Tiding over challenges
Making the platform resilient, robust, and transparent was one of the biggest challenges for the team. Infrastructure components fail everywhere, but the maturity of a platform lies in how gracefully the failures are recovered and retried in a way that the end-user gets their use case fulfilled in an uninterrupted manner. “In our case, the end virtual machines where user test runs have to be resilient so that no flakiness is introduced by the platform,” Jay reveals.
Another challenge is the availability of browsers and devices itself. “With a browser update available almost every week and a new device releasing every month, we need to ensure that our users have access to the latest devices and browsers to test their products,” he adds.
Collaborating with Microsoft
Built on Microsoft Azure, both HyperTest and Test at Scale are the only cloud test execution solutions built on the platform. Microsoft’s vast portfolio of services, highly stable products, and their solutions for almost any use case played a key role in choosing to partner with them.
Explaining the decision to partner with Microsoft, Jay reveals that they wanted HyperTest to be the fastest testing grid on the cloud. They wanted their users to be able to run hundreds or thousands of tests at the click of a button. And they achieved that with Azure. “With Azure, we were able to build that platform that is up to 70 percent faster than any traditional cloud-based Selenium Grid,” Jay says.
With HyperTest, the aim was to work towards the goal of delivering the fastest grid on cloud. To this end, Jay acknowledges that Azure does the heavy lifting. He says, “We wanted to enable a secure, scalable, and reliable test orchestration cloud without compromising on speed, thus directly impacting speed of release velocity in the fast paced world of digital adoption.”
LambdaTest is looking forward to closely working with Microsoft to identify other areas where they can add value in the Dev and QA ecosystem. “We are excited to take this partnership to the next level and not just by adapting Microsoft Azure infrastructure, but also getting into providing deeper insights to developers and QA economy, thereby helping them make decisions faster,” he adds.