Reddit slashes regression cycles from 5 days to hours with BrowserStack App Automate

Reddit is home to more than 100,000 active communities where people discuss everything from breaking news to niche hobbies. With a “remote-first” engineering culture distributed across the US, Poland, LatAm, and India, ensuring a seamless app experience for a global audience is critical. However, slow manual regression cycles and a lack of scalable infrastructure hindered their ability to release frequently. To solve this, Reddit adopted BrowserStack App Automate, resulting in faster releases, improved developer efficiency, and high-quality experiences for users.

When Parineeta Sinha joined Reddit in 2017, the platform was growing rapidly, but its testing infrastructure was minimal. The team relied on an outsourced vendor for manual validation, creating a massive bottleneck in the development lifecycle.

“We were very minimal when it came to testing. We had an outsourced team doing manual testing, and it would take five days to do a complete end-to-end regression before we could confidently say a release was good to go out,” Parineeta recalls.

This 5-day cycle restricted Reddit to a bi-weekly release schedule. Furthermore, as the team expanded into emerging markets like APAC, they faced a new set of challenges: ensuring performance on low-end devices and simulating varying network conditions. Without a centralized device lab, the distributed team struggled to replicate these specific user environments, leading to potential quality gaps.

“We needed a reliable device farm to scale from zero to 3,000 tests a day,” Parineeta says. “We wanted to reduce flaky tests, improve maintenance, and ensure our automation didn’t run stale against the velocity of our UI changes.”

Reddit chose BrowserStack App Automate for its seamless integration, stability, and ability to support a “shift-left” strategy. The evaluation process was decisive—BrowserStack stood out for its ease of use and specific capabilities that competitors lacked.

“The integration with our CI/CD pipeline was pretty smooth. It took us less than a few days to get integrated and start seeing results—videos of the tests, logs to debug failures, and network data,” Parineeta explains.

BrowserStack’s device cloud allowed Reddit to tackle their global quality challenges head-on. By leveraging Geolocation testing, the team could validate user flows from different locales (e.g., Germany or India) to ensure local compliance. Network simulation capabilities allowed them to test error handling under poor connectivity, ensuring the app didn’t crash when users lost signal.

Additionally, BrowserStack’s Day 1 support for new OS versions enabled Reddit to test against beta releases immediately. “We recently did exhaustive testing on the new iOS version, and BrowserStack was very helpful because they already had the beta versions available ahead of competitors,” notes Parineeta.

With BrowserStack App Automate, Reddit transformed its QA efficiency and dramatically increased its release cadence. The regression cycle, which once took five days of manual effort, has been slashed to just a few hours of automated execution.

“Our end-to-end time to get a fix out the door is now a couple of hours. That is a big, big drop in how much time we were taking initially,” Parineeta states. This efficiency allowed Reddit to shift from bi-weekly releases to weekly releases, with the ability to deploy hotfixes almost immediately.

Beyond speed, the team achieved a massive boost in confidence. Reddit now runs 3,000+ tests daily, achieving over 90% coverage on critical P0 user flows. This “shift-left” approach ensures that bugs are caught early in the development cycle, on every pull request, rather than days later.

Collaboration has also improved significantly. For a remote-first team spread across multiple continents, BrowserStack serves as a single source of truth. Developers in Poland and QA engineers in India access the same logs and recordings, streamlining triage and eliminating environment-related disputes.

“It’s been working great for us. We get results every night, we are able to confidently ship our releases, and the leadership perspective has been very positive,” Parineeta concludes.