Deckers Brands enables a hassle-free test automation strategy with BrowserStack

Deckers Brands is a global leader in designing, marketing, and distributing innovative footwear, apparel, and accessories with brands like UGG®, Koolaburra®, HOKA ONE ONE®, Teva® and Sanuk® under its portfolio.

The brand’s websites are crucial digital assets that drive sales. The QA team must maintain a high release velocity while not compromising on quality, as any UI bugs could negatively impact revenue and brand reputation. However, when users started reporting bugs on specific devices, the QA team moved testing to BrowserStack.

BrowserStack’s wide range of instantly available real browsers and devices helped the team run tests on real user conditions, catching bugs that would previously slip into production and improving release velocity. The hassle-free experience with BrowserStack’s cloud infrastructure helped Deckers Brands continue testing with the same effectiveness and efficiency even when teams transitioned to working remotely.

Before using BrowserStack, the QA team used emulators and simulators to test their websites. As emulators and simulators couldn’t entirely mimic real user conditions, many bugs would slip into production. This impacted customer experience and put revenue at risk as their websites are a core part of online sales channels.

The team realized the need for testing on real mobile devices to provide an enhanced customer experience and wanted to transition more into real hardware testing through existing automation. Other competing service providers didn’t have real devices integrated with their cloud infrastructure at the time, and as a result, Deckers Brands chose to partner with BrowserStack.

With BrowserStack, the QA team tests extensively to ensure that any UI issues or bugs in critical workflows are caught early in the development process. “BrowserStack allows us to have specialized tests that run against real hardware. We weren’t able to do it before,” explains Ryan O’Neil, Senior Manager, Deckers Brands.

Getting started on BrowserStack was effortless. The team could get their tests up and running within the first week of onboarding and share access to other teams outside the E-commerce division when needed. The collaboration between the QA team at Deckers Brands and BrowserStack proved critical in developing the tailor-made solution that met the expectations.

Speaking of the benefits brought in by BrowserStack, Ryan says, “Trying to maintain an internal device lab is an overhead, an unnecessary cost. We’re saving that expense and hassle by using BrowserStack’s real devices. They aren’t any different from if they were in-house; in fact, they’re a lot faster, cheaper, and easier to access.”

Deckers Brands currently uses two BrowserStack products – Live for manual testing and Automate for test automation. “With BrowserStack, we have more options – more functions and features we can use. My team has real hardware available and accessible at a moment’s notice. These ancillary benefits have helped speed up the team,” says Ryan.

Now that the team is working from home, BrowserStack’s cloud infrastructure is proving to be particularly useful when different team members from around the world need to test on real devices without having to maintain or access devices physically.

“The best thing about using BrowserStack is that I don’t have to worry about where we will test as we go through a stressful, complex, manpower-intensive transition into a headless microservice architecture. We will continue to use BrowserStack in the future because it is up and running no matter what,” says Ryan.