2020 At LambdaTest: Our Year In Review

2020 has been a crazy year so far. It has been challenging for businesses and consumers alike and I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to just forget this year and put it behind. After a year like 2020, we’re just as excited as you are to move on and ring in the new year.

Despite a lot of challenges and uncertainty, 2020 has been *knock on wood* a relatively good year for LambdaTest. And yes, we’d like to extend a sincere thanks to everyone who has been a part of our growth journey: our champion team, our partners, our investors, and, of course, you: our valuable customers. We couldn’t have done it without you.

2020 Was Not A Good Year For “In-House” Device Labs!

As teams across the world kickstarted the WFH culture, they realized that the “in-house” device labs were not that “in-house” anymore. They were forced to embrace the cloud technologies rather rudely.

We, here at LambdaTest, realized that we have bigger responsibilities towards these WFH teams. As these testing teams no longer had access to office devices to perform testing, they were coming in droves to platforms like LambdaTest to fill in that infrastructure gap. And it was our responsibility to ensure that this transition for them is as smooth as possible. The entirety of 2020 was spent to make this experience better and better for these development and testing teams.

We launched tons of new features, launched a dedicated desktop application to help in responsive testing, scaled our infrastructure to cater to all the incoming users, launched a new developer and tester-centric community to facilitate the exchange of knowledge, and started a newsletter to keep you updated with the latest and the greatest in the world of testing.

Is that all? Well, NO!!

So let’s take a look at the many milestones we achieved this year, all because of you.

New Features Galore

This year we introduced some of our biggest features. Geolocation Testing took our vision of providing an excellent browser compatibility testing experience one step further (more on this below). Network throttling gave our users the power to test their website or web app on low/high latency networks and offline. And there were even much more!

Given below are some of the top feature releases from this year.

• Geolocation Testing- We now provide a full-fledged browser compatibility testing experience for different countries in the world. Along with real-time testing on the platform, geolocation testing on Selenium Grid can be performed using Desired Browser Capabilities.
• Monitor Performance Metrics- You can now see the performance statistics of your website while running the Selenium tests with LambdaTest. You can find these metrics under the performance tab inside the Automation logs.
• Screenshot Behind Logins- Now, you can capture screenshots behind login pages for desktop devices and mobile websites or web-applications.
• Custom Data & Data Tags- This will help you filter your tests without much hassle or waste of time. It will make your test management process seamless, and you will be able to monitor tests with ease.
• Network Throttling- LambdaTest now allows you to select a network profile before executing your automation tests. You can now control the bandwidth latency by tweaking the network speed to 3G or 4G.
• Slack Alerts- With LambdaTest Online Selenium Grid, you can now trigger Slack alerts for your test builds. That way, you will always be aware once the test build execution is completed, and you would also be prompted about the test failures over Slack.

LT Browser – Making Responsive Testing Great Again

The biggest challenge for testers who suddenly didn’t have access to device labs was to perform responsive testing, in a fast and reliable way. To help them, we launched a new desktop app designed from the scratch to help in faster responsive testing. LT Browser is a dev-friendly browser that will allow you to perform responsive testing on 45+ mobile and desktop device sizes.

Since its launch in June, we’ve been releasing a steady stream of new features to LT Browser, such as performance reports, hot reloading, network throttling etc. Here’re some exciting new features of LT Browser that we’ve added since the launch-

• • Performance Reports Powered By Lighthouse- You won’t need to download any extensions to measure your website’s performance statistics; LT Browser now provides an integrated solution for viewing website scores and testing your website’s responsiveness.

• • Touch Mode- This feature will help you replicate user behavior on touch screen devices, giving you a pixel-perfect response across devices.
  • Built-In Developer Tools- With LT Brower, you can now instantly perform live mobile view debugging and validate any changes on your website.
  • Zoom Into Any Mobile View- We have embedded a zoom-in menu that will allow you to zoom into any mobile device.
  • Capture Full Page Screenshots- You can also capture full-page screenshots using the toggle from settings.
  • Get An Error Report- If there is an error on your URL, it would now be highlighted with an exclamation mark near the address bar. If you click on the exclamation mark, you will find a report related to the error.
  • Hot Reloading- For React Native lovers, LT Browser supports hot reloading to help you see your changes instantly in real-time as you hit save in your code editor or IDE.

• • Network throttling – Simulate your website performance and rendering over different mobile networks.

• • Device Sync – Mirror all your interactions over one mobile screen to another.

We’re just getting started with LT Browser, and 2021 will see even bigger and better features to come. If you haven’t explored it yet, make sure to check it out.

Topping The Charts On Product Hunt With Our Screenshot Scheduler

Not only did we launch one of our offerings on Product Hunt, but we did it with a bang! We launched LambdaTest Screenshot Scheduler in February, and it immediately bumped up to the #3 Product of the Day.

New Additions To Marketplaces

We went live on four marketplaces with our own plugins this year. Each of these plugins has been developed to make cloud-testing more seamless than ever.

• TeamCity Plugin– This plugin will help you manage your LambdaTest credentials, write and execute tests directly on the LambdaTest platform, and test your local, internal, dev, or stage environments securely with the help of LambdaTest Tunnel.
• LambdaTest Extension With Azure Pipelines– This extension will make it easier for you to manage your tasks, set up your LambdaTest account in Azure Pipelines, use the LambdaTest Tunnel for testing various production environments. And even embed or fetch the LambdaTest test results in your project’s job results.
• GitHub Actions For LambdaTunnel– Using our GitHub actions for LambdaTest Tunnel, you can now easily test your privately or locally hosted website! All you need to do is embed the LambdaTest tunnel GitHub actions into your job, and you’re all set.
• npm Package For TestCafe– This plugin integrates TestCafe with the LambdaTest testing cloud.

UnderPass – Desktop

2020 was the year that we introduced UnderPass to the world, a secure desktop application that enables you to test your locally or privately hosted web applications at LambdaTest. It helps you configure LambdaTest Tunnel without using the command line, through the GUI itself. It is now out of Beta testing with some cool new features like varying color coding for different updates, easy access and sharing of Log Directory, ability to change the Log Directory path, amongst other performance enhancements.

Additionally, in November, we rolled out an upgraded version of the LambdaTest Tunnel binary with a new user interface, enhanced security mechanisms, and much more. It comes packed with exciting features like colored logs, support for MITM mode and environment variables, new Lambda Modifiers, MagicLink feature, and the feature to Bypass hosts.

New Integrations

We are always looking at ways to make your testing experiences smoother than ever. Taking that into hindsight, we added a plethora of integrations for an enhanced user experience and seamless project management, continuous integration, bug management, and more. Here’s a list of integrations we went live with this year-

• AppVeyor CI
• Wrike
• Rocket.Chat
• Redmine
• TargetProcess
• Airtable
• GoCD
• Pivotal Tracker
• Mattermost
• Drone CI
• LEAPWORK
• Favro
• PractiTest
• Miro
• Microsoft Teams

Webinars

We love to connect with our users, readers and answer their questions every now and then. And we know that webinars are the best way to do that. Presenting our top 3 webinars of 2020-

1. Codeless Automation Testing with Katalon & LambdaTest
2. How To Overcome Test Automation Challenges with Codeless Automation?
3. How to Get True Cross Browser Test Coverage with TestCafe and LambdaTest

LambdaTest Community: A Community For Developers & Testers

We introduced the LambdaTest Community with a vision to help developers and testers interact, engage and grow with each other. A simple, free, and ready-to-post Q&A community developed for testers, by testers!

So in case you haven’t checked the Community yet, feel free to ask a question or answer one!

LambdaTest Certifications: Earn Resume-Worthy Credentials

With LambdaTest Certifications, we promise to help you showcase all of your testing skills to the world. These certificates will help you enhance your resume and flaunt those secret Selenium test automation skills, web designing skills, or any other hidden skills. It is free of charge (for now!)

LambdaTest Learning Hub: A One-Stop Testing Solution

Our Learning Hub is a free resource for all our users, customers, and readers, and as great as it is now, it’s only going to get better. We’re creating even more content as we write for a genuinely comprehensive hub.

Coding Jag: Curating The Best Of Testing

This year, we finally launched our weekly newsletter – “Coding Jag.” It has been hitting your inboxes (if you are a subscriber) every Thursday with a curated list of articles categorized around different spaces related to testing.

Subscribe to Coding Jag and get the best news around the testing world delivered to your inbox every Thursday morning.

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New Workplace & An Unstoppable Team

We started this year by moving to a new and bigger workspace. Though we haven’t had the pleasure of actually putting the new office to good use till this date, there’s a brighter side to it. We expanded our team three times (yes, despite the ongoing pandemic!). So we are all set to house our fast-growing team at the new premises as and when the pandemic allows us to go back.

A 360° Expansion

In 2020, our total user base expanded to 350,000+ users. As a cherry on the cake, we secured a $6m fundraising round led by Sequoia Capital India’s Surge. This round also saw participation from Blume Ventures, Entree Capital, Leo Capital, along with Gokul Rajaram and Ramakant Sharma. We have launched a couple of geographic locations for data center hosting to increase infrastructure redundancy and better availability. These geographic locations target both European and US-based customers. These have also resulted in lower latencies for our customers.

What’s Coming In 2021?

Right now, we are working on multiple things at the same time. We are working on bringing out more features around performance, bringing in support for more testing frameworks, and are expanding our infrastructure even further to cater our users who are spread across 132 countries. Over the past year we have emphasized heavily on improving overall quality and performance of the LambdaTest cloud and 2021 won’t be any different.

We are currently in the process of expanding into accessibility testing, native app testing, to name a few. We will also be going live with our own set of real devices to test your website and web apps. Additionally, we will also be targeting more locations in Asia and Australia to increase our geo presence in terms of infrastructure, and there’s a lot more on the horizon!

We are also working on bringing a blazingly fast full featured automation infrastructure that will change the way you run your tests at scale. But that’s for 2021 !!!

And Most Importantly!

As always, none of this would be possible without you, our customers. Thank you for putting your trust in LambdaTest and for giving us a chance to work on a product we love.

So from our whole team of LambdaTest, we want to wish you all the best for a productive and happy 2021! With that, we’ll be signing off for 2020 to spend a little time with our loved ones before heading into the new year. And we’re positive it’s going to be a good one.

And yes, what has been your favorite new addition in 2020? Let us know in the comments below.

Happy New Year!

Kritika Murari

A technophile and bibliophile at heart, Kritika loves to experiment with different aspects of Digital Marketing. When not working, you will either find her sketching or backpacking.

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