US-based software testing provider BrowserStack said it has given its visual testing suite a redesign in order to boost its visual testing capabilities.
The move will help businesses to address user interface issues across their digital properties by running software tests and visual optimisations, the firm said.
BrowserStack, a web and mobile testing tech provider that is venture capital-backed, said the visual testing tools include features such as Percy, App Percy and Visual Scanner, “preventing businesses from revenue losses due to poor website interfaces,” the company wrote in an email.
Nakul Aggarwal, the CTO of BrowserStack, emphasised the critical role of visual testing in ensuring consistent user experiences across numerous device-browser combinations.
With capabilities like the Percy Visual AI Engine and seamless CI/CD integration, he claims BrowserStack is able to reduce functional testing time by 50% while aiming for “pixel perfection,” as Aggarwal put it.
Moreover, he highlighted recent data that showed “the high stakes” of visual appeal, stressing that “consumers take a mere 0.05 seconds to form judgments about a website.”
“Alarmingly, 60% abandon purchases if interfaces aren’t up to par, leading to an average annual loss of $72,000 for businesses,” Aggarwal continued.
“While functional testing confirms feature operation, it often overlooks visual discrepancies that contribute to UX debt.”
BrowserStack is one of the most-used software testing firms in the banking and financial services space, particularly across North America. Among its prominent finserv clients are Wells Fargo, Capital One, Stripe and Mastercard.
Hyper-active period
BrowserStack, which is venture capital-backed and was recently valued at around $4 billion, has rapidly expanded its product portfolio in recent years, to include over 15 products, with ten alone launching in the last 18 months.
The company’s latest buy, Bird Eats Bug in August, marked BrowserStack’s fifth acquisition since Percy, the above-mentioned visual testing platform, in 2020. Bird Eats Bug is a bug reporting platform based in Berlin.
BrowserStack is currently in the process of integrating Bird Eats Bug’s capabilities into its existing QA ecosystem, culminating in the launch of Bug Capture, a new solution for manual testing.
“The acquisition not only aligns with BrowserStack’s vision of creating a developer-first end-to-end test platform but also underscores its urgent need to resolve gaps in bug-reporting processes and eliminate fragmented toolchains in testing,” stressed Ritesh Arora, the chief executive officer and co-founder of BrowserStack.
He went on to say that “by integrating Bug Capture’s approach to bug reporting into our platform, we’re not just streamlining workflows; we’re boosting development teams’ productivity so they can focus more on building great products and less on managing the intricacies of the testing process.”
Current software development suffers from inefficiencies in bug-reporting processes. Bug Capture allows teams to debug issues 30% faster on average, Arora claimed.
When asked to discuss the tool, he said the key features include instant replays, screen recording, and auto-captured technical logs, such as console and network logs, system details, and steps to reproduce, “all consolidated into one clean bug report.”
“These features work in harmony to eliminate the need for extensive back-and-forth between testers, product managers, developers, support teams, and customers,” Arora noted.
Low code testing
This week’s visual testing push comes only a month after BrowserStack developed and launched a new test automation platform that is low code based.
BrowserStack claimed the new platform will give automated testing a shot in the arm.
Because software teams face critical challenges, such as slow manual testing cycles bottleneck releases, traditional automation tools like Selenium require steep learning curves with long ramp-up periods before showing ROI, the firm argued.
Therefore, many financial organisations and other firms struggle with a shortage of automation engineers while talented testers lack coding skills, stressed Aggarwal.
“AI is further revolutionizing how test automation is done,” he continued, so “low-code automation eliminates these barriers, enabling to create and maintain AI-driven automated tests without code.”
In fact, Aggarwal went on to claim that “with low code automation, we’re transforming how teams approach quality assurance, [because] by empowering everyone to create automated tests, we’re enabling a true culture of quality.”
He was keen to point out that the platform stands out because of its “intuitive test recorder with no learning curve”, which can build tests in minutes by interacting with webapps in a browser.
Moreover, the solution simplifies complex assertions into a one-click visual validation and contains AI-driven self-healing tests that adapt to UI changes and reduce failures by up to 40%, Aggarwal explained.
Pending lawsuit
Despite the rapid expansion and range of takeovers, one of BrowserStack’s main rivals, software test equipment provider Deque Systems, did file a lawsuit against BrowserStack earlier this year in the U.S. over the use of one of its testing platforms.
Deque Systems reportedly alleges that BrowserStack acquired Deque’s proprietary testing platform DevTools, only for it to be taken apart and directly access its codes.
The codes, as Deque Systems claims, were then duplicated in order to develop BrowserStack’s own testing tool, which was subsequently launched and brought to market by BrowserStack at the end of last year.
“When we looked at the extent of the copying, the theft was intentional, pervasive, blatant and frankly, really shameless,” clarified Preety Kumar, the CEO and founder of Deque Systems, in a statement in March.
“So they even use their work emails, with ‘browserstack.com’ when they signed up for our trials [so] we have decided that we’re going to have to vigorously defend our intellectual property rights,” Kumar said.
Deque Systems develops accessibility software and testing tools and is used by a range of large U.S. banks, including PNC Financial services and U.S. Bancorp.
Kumar said Deque Systems spent more than five years developing the testing platform. She stressed designing efforts evolved around ensuring that the product remains usable for novice users and still be compatible with algorithms at the backend.
“Some of the questions that are in BrowserStack’s product are verbatim stolen questions from our product, as well as in addition to some of the code that they saw,” Kumar claimed.
When approached by QA Financial, both BrowserStack and Deque Systems declined to discuss the pending case.
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