LambdaTest - Cloud-Based Platform For All Testing Needs

LambdaTest is a cloud-based platform that caters to all your automation and manual testing needs without owning any device physically. LambdaTest provides web application testing, mobile web, and native app testing with an option to choose from emulators or actual devices. In addition to usual web and app testing, the tool allows a list of integrations, making it a unified solution with all the necessary features for a tester.

Website: https://www.lambdatest.com
System requirements: Windows, Linux, macOS with minimum 4 GB RAM and a web browser, preferably Chrome (min version 60), Safari (min version 9), Edge (minimum version 95), Firefox (min version 70), Opera (minimum version 60).
License & Pricing: Freemium and Premium
Support: https://www.lambdatest.com/contact-us
Documentation: https://www.lambdatest.com/support/docs/

Installation

LambdaTest is entirely online cloud-based; therefore, there is no need to download and install any software from your end. All you need is a web browser through which the testers can perform testing and gather information for their tests.

Web Testing

LambdaTest can be used to perform testing on a web application viewed on mobile or desktops. This can be achieved either manually or through automation testing, as the platform supports both options. For manual testing, the tester is offered a list of devices, browsers, OS, and more to select the exact configuration of the target device. The website can be opened on any of the combinations of these specifications, either on a real device or an emulator and simulator.

App Testing

LambdaTest provides a robust infrastructure to cater to mobile app testing needs, as many organizations focus solely on their application. This is performed similarly to how web app testing is performed, the only difference being that we need to upload a binary of the application so that it can be installed on the target device. This is done after selecting the correct specification of the device, such as the Samsung Galaxy S22 running on Android 12. The platform offers to choose an option between a real device and an emulator here, both of which are installed already on their infrastructure. The tester need not purchase anything from their end.

Geolocation Testing

Geo-location testing helps us view the behavior of our application when it is opened from various geographical locations. Since different logic can be applied for other locations, geo-location testing helps us ensure whether these logics is working correctly.

Conventionally, companies would hire freelancers and professionals from different locations, which posed severe security and misleading information challenges. LambdaTest integrates the geo-location feature on their platform to change the location with a single click when the application is opened. The tester can verify their changes from a single account related to multiple locations.

Device Offerings

A tester can perform tests either manually or via automation on LambdaTest. Both of these tests need to be run on a device the platform provides. However, different testing types may require different types of devices. For instance, UI testing can be performed on an emulator but benchmark testing may not. To cover all these testing scenarios, LambdaTest provides emulators, simulators, and real devices in all categories for all types of testing.

Local Page Testing - LambdaTest Tunnel

In general, when we talk about web testing, we are talking about the published website where we can enter the URL and start testing on multiple devices. However, when the development is contained to the local system in the early stages, publishing websites repeatedly when we make a change on temporary servers is time-consuming. For this, local resources can be used, but they are unreliable, and we cannot expand them to multiple devices.

LambdaTest Tunnel creates a secure connection between the local server (hosted on the local system) and its infrastructure. Once this connection is established, the testers can launch their website similar to what they would on a local browser (such as localhost). From here on, testers can perform testing similar to a published website easily and quickly.

HyperExecute

HyperExecute is a test orchestration cloud that satiates all your testing needs with a 70% faster speed than a conventional cloud. It is blended with Artificial Intelligence that can learn through your past test runs and reorganize the test cases to provide better results. The runners for this feature are available on Windows, macOS, and Linux containers with installed support for popular programming languages and frameworks.

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HyperExecute maintains its efficiency on the build and test runs by combining all the data from all the resources (such as terminal logs and test case execution logs etc.) in a single place. The AI algorithms then analyze the collective results and present them to the testers on a single dashboard.

HyperExecute is a secure cloud-based platform; all of these features can also be leveraged on private cloud infrastructure. It helps organizations looking to work internally on their firewalls.

Visual Regression Cloud

UI designers spend hours on creating the perfect layout of a web page which is pleasing visually, and element placements are perfect. However, it may not usually be the same for the developers. It may be, but only on specific devices and not all. This is not the developer’s fault. Elements tend to move and behave differently on different devices. Manual testing works but is not always effective because the human eye cannot detect minor differences such as the 2 deg rotation of a block.

Visual regression cloud helps identify these issues by comparing a base image and the current screenshot of the webpage. This can work for differences that are even on a single pixel level.

AI-powered Test Analytics

Test execution is followed by analyzing all the results, introspecting where we went wrong, and strategizing for the future. But we do not follow one common standard path in today's testing world. Instead, there is a combination of multiple testing types, platforms, and methods to test and debug the mobile application effectively. This creates a problem once we are done with testing. Combining all the test results and then analyzing them according to various categories is too time-consuming. The more time we spend on these things, the more money we lose.

LambdaTest provides AI-powered test analytics to take over this work and do that for the tester. As a tester, they directly get results from all the resources at a central platform as follows:

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This can be customized according to the need. The main sections include test case health summary, test summary, test trends, and test status ratio.

The AI algorithm also creates an impressive collection of all the test failures to see them not as a single entity but at a more granular level.

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Such graphs facilitate debugging and help point out these errors without any manual work. As a result, LambdaTest’s AI-powered test analytics helps wrap things up faster than conventional methods.

LT Browser

Developers often use a mobile-first design approach to ensure that their web application on mobile devices is perfect. On the other hand, testers need mobile devices to ensure that the website works as intended on all target devices. Similarly, business analysts and stakeholders also need mobile device renders to input their views on the final result. While all this can be done through “web testing in LambdaTest,” we sometimes long for a tool with desktop browser-like features to debug and understand issues more deeply. For instance, inspecting the elements is impossible on mobile devices, and for a tester, that may be one of the most crucial testing tools.

LT Browser is a responsive testing tool that enables you to test responsive web design across 53+ pre-installed device viewports. It offers features like inspecting elements, debugging them, hot reloading, and testing features such as bug filing, screenshots, recording session videos, and more.

LT Browser could make the process highly efficient and smooth for developers and testers. And the best part is the LT browser is built on top of the Chromium engine, which takes care of security and efficiency at the source code level.

Integrations

Software testing has become a complex job today because complex software demands complex testing mechanisms. As a result, we combine the power of multiple software to maintain an end-to-end system of processes resulting in quality testing. But managing all this software can be challenging when they exceed a specific limit. Since the data from one is often connected to the other, it consumes time for the team.

LambdaTest comes with all the popular software integrated into the platform that helps facilitate testing. For instance, the tester can connect Jira, Slack, GitHub, GitLab, and hundreds of other tools to get everything under one roof.

Smart TV Testing

Televisions have advanced technologies today that let the user view any website and specific applications on their television. Termed “Smart” due to their high-end capabilities, organizations tend to provide a separate app for their TV users (such as video streaming organizations) or at least optimize their website for televisions. But the majority of tools and frameworks do not provide this support due to lesser popularity among the testing community.

LambdaTest comes with in-built smart TV testing capabilities. It helps perform regular OTT app testing explicitly made for TVs, integrate with third-party applications like CI/CD, record session videos, and apply parallelization to your test cases. Whatever you can do on a desktop device or a mobile device can be done on Smart TV on the LambdaTest platform.

Conclusion

While the market now provides hundreds of options for the user, this makes the work of developers and testers a bit more challenging. Working on multiple platforms for multiple testing requirements in this crowded market is extremely time-consuming and results in high costs.

On top of it, gathering data from all these tools in a single place and arranging them categorically is another hectic job. For such tasks, we always turn towards a single-stop solution that reduces the time, effort as well costs of the project.

LambdaTest excels in all of the complexities stated above and provides an easy-to-use platform that lets you centralize everything in a single place. It helps perform web testing, mobile testing, Selenium-based test executions, and a lot more. It comes free of charge and requires just a web browser to operate.

This article explores its major offerings and their implementation into the testing phase with clear distinctions from other tools.

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This article was originally published in March 2023