Automating web application testing is a very tricky process due to inherent complexity, dynamic behavior(s) in web pages, differences in the way browsers render the same content (especially on different form factors), and so on. Yet manual testing is not a practical option, and such automation is a must in the interests of effectiveness and efficiency, because of the large number of browsers/devices that users can choose from, and also given the rapid software development cycles of today. This paper discusses our efforts at Varidesk to automate web tests against our main website - which offers many features and content, but is also a true eCommerce site where users from around the globe can purchase a very broad variety of active workspace solutions that we offer. Our solution was developed in-house, from the ground up, and leveraged and extended freely available automation and test libraries such as Selenium WebDriver and NUnit respectively. We talk about the challenges we faced and how we overcame them, as well as provide technical insights on real-world concerns such as managing test brittleness, and integrating the web tests into an existing Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. Part of the novelty of this paper is that we are also transparent on the rationale behind our decision to build versus buy, and how we managed resources, especially in terms of cost. We also present lessons learned, and encouraged by the success that we have observed, hope that the results will be beneficial to academia and practitioners alike.

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are widely considered to be best practices in software development. Studies have shown however, that adopting these practices can be challenging and there are many barriers that engineers may face, such as – overly long build times, lack of support for desired workflows, issues with configuration, etc. At Varidesk, we recently began shifting our primary web application (from a monolithic) to a micro-services-based architecture and also adapted our software development practices to aim for more effective CI/CD. In doing so, we also ran into some of the same afore-mentioned barriers. In this paper we focus on two specific challenges that we faced – long wait times for builds/releases to be queued and completed, and the lack of support for tooling, especially from a cross-cloud perspective. We then present the solutions that we came up with, which involved re-thinking DevOps as it applied to us, and re-building our own CI/CD pipelines based on DevOps-supporting approaches such as containerization, infrastructure-as-code, and orchestration. Our re-designed pipelines have led us to see speed increases, in terms of total build/release time, in the range of 330x-1110x and have enabled us to seamlessly move from a single-cloud to a multi- cloud environment, with no architectural changes to any apps.