56: Steve Hazel: How to Make Your Automation Better & New Sauce UI

Discover New & Existing Sauce Features

Discover new and existing functionality to make your Sauce Labs automation tests even more awesome. Steve Hazel, CTO and co-founder of Sauce Labs, shares his deep development knowledge of how to make your tests run reliably in Sauce. Steve also reveals some cool new UI features recently added to Sauce Labs to make your Sauce automation experience even better.

About Steve

Steven is the Co-founder of Sauce Labs Inc. and has been its Chief Technology Officer since April 2015. Steve also served as the Chief Architect and Senior Director of Development at Sauce Labs Inc.

He also served as Director of Engineering of BitTorrent and held senior development roles at Grouper Networks (acquired by Sony Pictures in 2006), FolderShare (acquired by Microsoft in 2005), and Audiogalaxy. Steve is also one of the original authors of FolderShare.

Rerun #tests in #CI on failure to id flaky tests separate from legit test failures @sahazel #TestTalks

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• All new dashboard that helps optimize your CI workflows with Sauce
• The big trend that I see coming from a technology point of view, is related to virtualization and containerization. 
• We're releasing a major revision to our user interface. It's a refresh of the look and feel and interaction style but much more importantly, it's a rethink of how the user interface for our product should work.
• The new interface is really designed to assume that that's the workflow, that it's connected to a CI system
• We're definitely focused on expanding our capabilities in mobile testing, that's a big focus for us.
• The big challenge with growing an organization is that communication gets harder and harder
• Short tests seem to work out much better than longer ones
• A really strong practice is to separate the idea of looking for application failures from the idea of looking for flaky tests
• I fight hard against the branches. Branches are great for making a nice, readable commit history and they're great if you use them sparingly My opinion is you know I go for feature flags over branches wherever possible. I try to have things merged and deployable even if they're not done, just to keep things continuously integrated and merged together. I think it's a great safety check that you understand what everybody on your team is doing and you're not duplicating work or doing work that collides with what somebody else is doing.
• Much, much more! Listen to the full episode.

Resources

• All new Sauce UI
• Learn Python the Hard Way

Connect with Steve

• Twitter:@sahazel
• Blog:awesame.org
• Company: SauceLabs

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