Hassan Awan
Almost every business is web-dependent in this era. Even if your business is mostly done offline, most of your potential customers would first start their search from online means. Having a web presence is important. Equally important is to make sure that all users get same experience no matter the device, operating system, or browser they are using.
When it comes to checking the functionality of your site across all platforms, cross browser testing is the quite important because it not only helps you make sure that the website’s compatible across browsers, but also with different screen resolutions, operating systems, and devices.
But, is it enough to test the cross browser compatibility of your site once? What about everytime you release a change in the platform or add a new feature or update the website? The process of testing is now a part of continuous delivery and therefore cross browser testing should be a part of your continuous delivery pipeline as well. ?
In this article, we will discuss why it’s necessary to test the cross browser compatibility of your web app, and why you should automate it in continuous delivery.
Why Cross Browser Testing?
Every web application performs differently across various platforms for multiple reasons, mainly due to the code interpretation differences of rendering engines. As you know, different browsers have different rendering engines, so they behave differently for web applications. In order to meet browser’s standard, developers need to write separate code for every browser.
Generally, a browser transforms HTML, CSS code, and other components of web pages into an interactive visual appearance on various devices. So, whenever a new update comes to a browser, chances are your site might appear in a different manner on it or doesn’t appear at all. Thus, it’s vital to perform cross browser testing of your web app across all browsers, especially if you have a responsive site. Take a look at the below example to understand it better.
Let’s say that you have tested your website across Chrome, Safari, and Edge browsers. A service or product on your site starts trending, more and more people are now visiting your site. But, soon the website traffic gets lower. Why?
Because the high amount of traffic was coming from the Firefox browser, and your site is not compatible with it, which results in lower visitor traffic. Poor website compatibility not only affect visitor traffic, but it also makes a massive impact on your brand’s reputation. That’s why cross browser testing of a web app across all browser is crucial.
Automating Cross Browser Testing in Continuous Delivery
The number of browsers, devices, and operating systems is overgrowing, every month hundreds of new devices are released in the market, along with a nearly monthly update in browser technology, and very frequent updates in operating systems. . Testing your site across a few browsers and assuming it would work fine across others too is not sufficient. Thus, ensuring every feature of your web app works in every browser is a must.
Similarly on the other hand, continuous delivery is the process of delivering tested code to production continuously while deploying to production manually. So, if you are following continuous delivery practices, where release cycles take place frequently in a short time span, then it’s almost impossible to test the same functionality of your web app manually over and again across various test environments. manual testing of webapp functionality takes a lot of time and could be a bottleneck in ensuring faster release cycles. Thus, manual testing is not the right approach for continuous delivery of quality web applications with less ROI. The only solution is to automate cross browser testing efforts along with application testing to ensures an effective continuous delivery process in Agile.
There are numerous benefits of automating cross browser testing in continuous delivery, such as:
⦁You get to execute tests faster while achieving great quality
⦁You are allowed to create automated tests that can be reused over and over
⦁Continuously integrate and continuously test
⦁Repetitive testing ensures quality
⦁You can deploy code automatically with confidence
⦁Closely aligned with business requirements
⦁Ensure faster delivery time to the market
Take Help from Cloud-Based Automation Tools
When you choose to automate cross browser testing in continuous delivery with tools like Selenium, Appium, you need to set up a testing environment on your system, as well as you need a testing framework for it. Depending upon your project requirements, it could be both cost-intensive and time-intensive to coordinate, maintain, and scale multiple browsers and devices.
However, with the help of cloud-based automation testing platforms like LambdaTest, you can execute tests across thousands of real devices and browsers integrated with the cloud, as well as you can automate test flows across varying platforms, browsers, and their versions. You can even optimize your web app for each device and its versions with the cloud. Thus, a cloud-based cross browser testing tool is better suited for continuous delivery requirements.
And we believe, LambdaTest could be the right choice for you in terms of cloud-based testing tools. It is a cloud-based automated testing platform that is integrated with a combination of more than 2000 browsers, devices, and operating systems. Moreover, it comes with WordPress and Chrome extension, and Screenshot API that allows you test web pages of your site automatically.
Conclusion
When your business starts growing, it’s obvious that the traffic on your site also starts increasing. Now, this traffic can come from any device or any browser, but if your website is not compatible with the targeted browsers, then the visitor might abandon it immediately and move to another. Thus, cross browser testing of your site becomes a priority of your business. Moreover, automating cross browser testing in continuous delivery is also crucial if you want to keep up with the Agile standards and continuous delivery requirements.
