I’ve been testing software professionally since 2001, when I was in my late 20s—when my eyesight was perfect. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve struggled with whether to make the font bigger on my web browser or phone, or to carry my reading glasses everywhere I go. I have to make this choice because some web sites were developed to account for this, and some weren’t. As I get older, this problem is only going to get worse.

Testing any software project is an important step in order to find out how the software functions. Learning when the project acts as expected (and when it does not) is the ultimate goal of the testing process. Testing stops design errors from reaching production code. However, testing should not only happen before code is deployed.

Today is a great day at Sauce Labs! We just announced that we’ve acquired Backtrace, a provider of best-in-class error monitoring solutions for software developers and engineers. Backtrace enables organizations to mitigate application risk and improve digital quality by empowering development teams to rapidly deploy code with confidence knowing that they can quickly identify and remediate bugs once in production.

As far as web test automation goes, Selenium is certainly the most popular toolset. That popularity is uncontested. A survey on test automation finding that 54% of the respondents were using Selenium might be surprising only in that the number is so low. Many of the alternatives to Selenium, Software-as-a-Service products that record and re-run entirely in the browser, still use the Selenium as the core driving technology.