What needs improvement with Sauce Labs?

They could improve the platform's customer support services. Many users, including myself, have experienced significant delays in response times and unsatisfactory resolutions when reaching out for assistance. The support team often provides generic recommendations that do not address the specific issues raised, leading to prolonged downtime. Additionally, there needs to be more proactive communication and follow-up on reported problems. Another area for improvement is keeping pace with updates to the latest libraries and technologies. For example, Sauce Labs' proprietary driver and Saucectl need to be updated more frequently to support the latest versions of popular testing frameworks like Playwright. This lag in compatibility means that users may miss out on critical features and improvements available in newer versions, necessitating workarounds or compromises in their testing workflows.

Sauce Labs can include new technologies like generative AI, which can reduce the human effort in writing test cases. For example, in my current project, we reduced the time it took to complete user acceptance tests from six hours to three. There's potential to further optimize the execution cycle time of test scripts.

With the desktop browser, we can inspect any screen with the web developer option, but they should provide something for mobiles so that we can quickly inspect elements on the device. To write the Selenium scripts, we require web locators. We have to capture them from the local and execute the script on Sauce Labs. If Sauce Labs can provide a solution where we can inspect any of the mobile devices online, it will be very helpful for us. I also faced an issue where during the execution time, the iCloud password used to expire within a certain period, which used to create pop-ups on the screen making our tests fail. That was one thing that we faced many times. If that can be improved, it will be very helpful.

When we were in development, it was a bit of a pain because we have onshore and offshore development. One of our development shops is in India, and we were running tests over there. When some of the users tried to log in, it was slow for them or we didn't have enough licenses. That was during the core development before we even launched. We got around that by purchasing more seats, tinkering with some of the virtualization pieces, and scaling. Now we don't have that issue, because we scaled back the offshore team significantly, so when we run it overnight, there's really no effect. We come in the next morning and review the results. It doesn't affect the overall business or the offshore team. There were also some bottlenecks because of the amount of time testing takes, so we started using more tunnels and running it in parallel. That was the main issue that we faced initially, but now that it's all set up, we're good to go. We were struggling with the volume of tests, and Sauce Labs suggested we run everything in parallel. Sauce Labs isn't lacking any features that we want, and it has several we're not using, like mobile and API testing. They've also introduced a ton more features since we launched, so I don't see anything missing on their end.

Nothing comes to mind right now, but this might be because I'm an administrator and not an end-user who is familiar with the application's use case. If we have teams asking for something that isn't already there, we communicate that back to Sauce Labs. That hasn't happened so far in the time that I've been in this role. I may not know what should be improved on the platform, but I think it could offer a greater variety of testing solutions. I know there might be competing solutions that cover more aspects that I'm unaware of, and it could expand a bit more. We've done a lot of automated testing scenarios, and that's all the rage these days, so I think Sauce Labs could look at potential ways to improve and cover other scenarios.

I can't remove team members that have left the organization. I can only set them as inactive. It would be really nice to clean up my data and delete them from the team management.

Every time that we run scenarios where we need to discover the geolocation of our customers, by default it shows as Palo Alto, California. That's a problem for us and we need a workaround for those cases. It would be great if Sauce Labs didn't provide any geolocation by default, and we could provide the geolocation that we want. It would be helpful if we could enter a latitude and longitude into Sauce Labs configuration and say, "When you run a virtual Chrome device or an iPhone, make this your default location. Then, provide me that device so I can run my scenarios," because we have stores in different regions across the United States. That is the only "ask" that I have for a feature, a geolocation that we can set by configuration. That would be awesome.

We had some specific features that we opened tickets on, although they were not earth-shattering. For example, the way the menus scroll could be improved because it does not have a bar, the way that people are used to, where you can move up and down. It is something that you have to flick in order to activate.

The market is changing and we're seeing a lot of shift towards testing on OTT devices, like Apple TV, Fire TV Sticks, Chromecast and Roku. This is really an emerging market and has the potential to grow exponentially. We've been getting a lot of clients asking us to test on OTT devices, either manually or via automation. We have been able to automate testing on OTT devices, but it is done with local devices hosted on our premises, so we can't scale that fast or cover all of the huge demand we are seeing. We're looking for the ability to do this in the cloud, so if Sauce Labs offered such a feature, that would be really great. Working on OTT devices usually includes testing on desktop browsers or phones/tablets and having all of those supported in one platform would be ideal. While Sauce Labs pretty much covers everything we need, another exception is HarmonyOS. I know it's a new thing and it's not supported by a lot of providers, but it is something that clients have started asking for. That is something we'd be really interested in seeing, for both manual and automated testing. Also, latency, due to Sauce Labs being a cloud-based solution, has been a concern. We work in different continents and countries, but last time I checked, Sauce Labs was only offering two data centers, one in the EU and another in the US. If you're not in either of those two places, you would have latency and issues running your test scripts. However, I'm working with clients in different countries and we've seen some latency issues, depending on the country, although it's not huge. In comparison to other providers who have data centers in different places, there is some noticeable latency.

The process can be a little slow to configure and get started. It's a cloud platform and you're trying to run automated tests. It first has to be configured, then the test downloaded, then you have to configure the environment that you're going to run on, then kick off the test based on what your needs are. All of this takes time. We have faced challenges with the availability of mobile devices. There was once or twice where there were no mobile devices available. These instances may have been due to a service outage.

The testing process is difficult. I need to prove the complete competency of the tool, and I am finding that challenging.

A service that could be improved is some of their Wiki documents are either outdated or point to broken URLs; however when contacting the customer service they are able to respond in a quick manner with either an updated document or with the steps to fix the issue. Another feature that could still be improved on is more error clarity. Sometimes when running automated scripts the test will fail on the device side instead of the script and errors only show a 500 try again message instead of a detailed script that could of a been a timeout error from the code.

As a web product QA team, we sometimes need to spot check some new child site on multiple browsers and OS(es). It was a little time consuming for us since we need to click on each of the browser/OS combinations and start a new session to test. Every sprint, with new features and child pages being added, we mostly need to do the same steps over and over again. We would like to see if Sauce Labs can be able to open multiple different browsers on the same website at the same time, just by 1 click. It will reduce a lot of time for manually click and change the devices/OS combination.

From a company use standpoint - I have no complaints. The one issue I have is the 14-day trial that a new user gets for free. I understand the concept of the trial period; however, I think this could be revamped to a free 30-minute run time every few months or after a significant update once the trial period has ended. Personally speaking - I like to maintain my automation framework and would like to occasionally test that it continues to run on Sauce Labs after releases without stealing from Sauce Labs.

Overall, I think Sauce Labs provides us with a valuable tool and resource. As far as what could be improved, I would say the overall test execution time. Some of the calls take a bit longer than I expect, for example in web browser tests; while the execution time isn't obnoxious, it could be improved so that overall tests/test suites finish faster. Within the insights section of the Sauce Labs tool, I think it would be nice if you could go back farther than 30 days worth of data. I like all the custom filters available, but being able to go back say 90 days (or more) would show more statistics on our data/test results. In the next release, I'd like to see continual new additions of OS's. This area is usually pretty up-to-date, please keep at it!

Improve easy way to automation testing and generate script automatically while running manual test cases on Sauce. 1. When running manual test cases, provide us a way to record and playback the same steps 2. Provide JIRA integration plugin so that we can easily log issues. 3. Provide easy way to create scripts automatically for manual steps and use sauce labs UI to execute it again 4. Sauce labs should provide their own email client and easy to send email in that user session 5. One-click setup for sauce proxy

The only drawback is the speed, it will be good if we have a server in Asia too. It will be great if we can improve speed while initialization and execution.

We have used Sauce Labs extensively for the last 5 years across automated and manual testing and have found some problems during this time. Firstly as we use Sauce Labs to connect the tunnel to connect to apps in our internal network we have found that during automated testing this can be very slow. This causes inconsistencies with the tests. It's very difficult to rely on a service when you can't be sure if a test will pass or fail the next time it runs. This means building in a lot of sync time into the tests which in turn slows them down. If this speed could be improved then the service would be much better.

If I had to speak of an area that could be improved it would probably have to be the speed of interaction with the devices. There is at times a considerable amount of lag while using some of the virtual and at times even physical device farms. While this is absolutely better than not having it situation Sauce Labs certainly would benefit as well as we the user would certainly benefit from gaining a software interaction speed boost. Having it more consistent would be greatly appreciated if the long run. This is the only thing affecting the testing time at the moment and can even be seen as a disadvantage in comparison to having an actual physical device in hand.

More physical devices.

Progress towards reducing application testing time can be made. There should be better and programmatic controls on request/response recordings and sharing with developers similar to new testing frameworks on the market.

* Ability to configure the memory and CPU for the test machines * Ability to install profiles on iOS real mobile devices

It would be nice for it to ask for the URL along with browser/operating system I want to try, but not for it to simply ask for a combination. I want to be able to start ten at the same time. I would also like to put a username and password before the test launch instead of entering ten tabs and having to put the same information over and over again.

Integration with Github, as well as several other similar tools, could be improved. However, Sauce Labs appears to be on that track. With all of the innovations that they have made over the past year and a half, I am looking forward to the changes they have planned for the future.

An image comparison would be a nice feature to include in the Sauce Labs product.

Sometimes pasting text while using "text object" does not seem to work, and it slows down testing times quite a bit.

It should provide more examples of script code.

1. They still have very slow support and ask many excessive questions before starting to fix the issue. When we submit tickets in their reporting system, we expect them to start tracking down the problem as soon as possible. Instead, it looks like they ask standard questions just to delay work to a few days. E.g. 1st day: "Could you confirm you use the latest version" - "Yes, we do" 2nd day: "Ok. Can you then try to run that with extra flag Y and grab the log for us" - "Yes, please, take the log" <2 days of silence> 5th day: ... - "Guys, is there any progress on that?" and so on... Sometimes questions are really unrelated and take time like "Have you read the Getting Started guide?" 2. They still have platform-specific issues, especially on Mobile platforms. They wouldn't affect trivial tests though. E.g. they have issues related to SauceConnect traffic routing specific to iOS 9 and Android 4. This affect tests that want to sniff the traffic only though. Please, let me know if you want more technical details. 3. Sometimes they change configuration options (e.g. rename... E.g. recently they changed desired capability for iPhone Simulator in a way like "iPhone 6 simulator" > "iPhone 6" That affected multiple tests suddenly. They haven't made any notification about that though.