For retailers and those who support their customers, Black Friday and Cyber Monday can put a massive strain on company resources–hardware, software, and personnel. In the DevOps scene, those personnel are the developers, testers, and finally operators who have to build, QA, and deploy that software. In the ever advancing enterprise sector we have seen an increased need to produce and deploy applications not just on a larger scale, but on a quicker timeline.

John Parsons, infrastructure engineer at Savings.com, says that the upcoming holiday season is expected to bring in more than 5 million unique visitors. Each of them looking to score a deal and with so many partners under their belts, Savings.com has a lot to keep up with. He explained to SiliconANGLE that automated testing is the way to go, and he should know his stuff, he’s worked in a testing and QA related field for over a decade.

Back in 2010 when Parsons joined Savings.com the application cycle was a new feature every 3 weeks–from development to production and this included manual testing and regression testing.

Fast forward to 2013 and times have changed, to stay competitive in a market with web services Savings.com needed to tighten up that function lifecycle. Now the company is releasing so swiftly–at a rate of two times a day automatically–that rapid tests have become a necessity. Manual testing just couldn’t cut it.

Automated testing is the future of DevOps

The goal: testing a new function across as many platforms and browsers in as many scenarios as possible within a 10 minute window. The automated test suite also adds the capability to test actual live data against the new functions, providing the best-possible test pattern (after all who better to break the system than its own users.)

To get this done, Savings.com turned to Sauce Labs, already well known experts in automation and testing. With Sauce Labs on board, Savings.com brought testing, integration, and deployment time down and it’s all automated.

“Today it’s really oldschool to run your own tests in house and you need to use a service that can provide you with all the OS versions and support customization for your test environments,” says Parsons.

Manual testing works well only for one case, explains Parsons, and that’s visual UI elements, color coordination, visibility, alignment; all the things that involve human perception and intuition. For everything else, automated testing is the way to go.

More importantly, in this era where testing is becoming a cornerstone of a quality product, manual testing just cannot keep up. Most importantly, it doesn’t scale well. To scale, manual testing requires more employees (a costly resource.) Manual testing also relies on people working long hours and doing repetitive tasks; for anything that should work the same way every time, with expected results, automated testing is the way to go.

Black Friday and quality control

Parsons went on to say that usually during Black Friday Savings.com locks down all function releases–preferring to work from last-best-known because it reduces that chances of something going wrong with so many people visiting.

However, with Sauce Labs on board making testing so swift and so sure, the company is more willing to go with new functions if some dealer or vendor wants something put into play on an urgent basis. And, noting the ability to run almost one hundred test cases in under 10 minutes even Black Friday or Cyber Monday wouldn’t get them down.

As we’ve seen speaking about the use of automation for configuration and testing, it’s obvious that it’s the way of the future.

Sauce Labs agreed and a representative told SiliconAngle that more customers are looking into test automation to sweep aside less efficient manual testing. In the end, test automation is the quickest, and best way to make sure that a new function is up-to-spec before it goes live and a bug hits a business where they live.