Schneider Electric reduces test flakiness by 50% with BrowserStack AI-Powered App Automate

Schneider Electric is a global leader in energy management and industrial automation, serving businesses and industries across the world with software, hardware, and connected systems. The Customer & Innovation Lab sits at the centre of Schneider Electric’s testing and verification activities, supporting multiple lines of business across the organisation with system-level testing of mobile applications, embedded systems, and connected devices across Android and iOS platforms.

With teams distributed across geographies including India, Canada, France, and the United States, and a growing portfolio of enterprise applications that needed to run reliably on a wide range of real devices, the lab’s legacy approach of maintaining a physical device bank was reaching its limits. By adopting BrowserStack App Automate, Schneider Electric scaled device coverage by 10 times, reduced infrastructure maintenance overhead by 70%, and cut both bug reproduction time and test flakiness by 50%, while giving distributed teams around the world instant, secure access to the devices they needed.

Before BrowserStack, Schneider Electric’s Customer & Innovation Labs maintained an in-house device bank: a locked kiosk containing physical Android and iOS devices, connected via USB cables to a central hub. As the team and its testing demands grew, and as Covid made remote work the new reality, the limitations of this approach became impossible to ignore.

1. Physical device management was a constant operational burden: Maintaining the device bank meant charging devices, applying software updates, provisioning them for shared access, and ensuring they were always available and in working condition. Every device required active management, and any failure or unavailability directly blocked testing activity.

2. Distributed teams could not access shared devices: With product teams spread across India, Canada, France, and the US, sharing a physical device bank was impractical. Shipping devices to remote team members based on testing priority was both time-consuming and logistically complex, and it still left teams without devices when they needed them most.

3. Covid accelerated an already critical problem: When the pandemic forced teams to work from home, the device bank became entirely inaccessible to anyone not physically present in the lab. The challenge of how to give every team member access to the right device, regardless of where they were, became urgent overnight.

4. Limited device coverage constrained test plans and release velocity: With only ten to fifteen physical devices available, the lab could cover only a fraction of the real-world device and OS combinations that Schneider Electric’s applications needed to support. Test plans had to be scoped down to fit the available hardware, and release velocity was effectively capped by the size of the physical infrastructure.

5. iOS testing required dedicated, expensive hardware setups: Testing iOS applications required a Mac machine physically connected to an iPhone, along with careful version management and environment configuration. This created a separate, costly infrastructure requirement for every team that needed iOS coverage, and made cross-platform testing particularly burdensome.

6. Reproducing field issues on specific devices was often impossible: When field issues were reported from customers or field service engineers on specific device and OS combinations, the lab frequently did not have that exact configuration available. Reproducing the issue was either impossible or required procuring new hardware, delaying resolution and eroding confidence in the team’s ability to support Schneider Electric’s businesses in the field.

After evaluating virtual device platforms and finding them insufficient for system-level and end-to-end testing, Schneider Electric selected BrowserStack App Automate in 2019 and 2020. The decision was driven by the need for real device validation, seamless integration with existing app delivery platforms, and the ability to scale without any physical infrastructure investment.

1. App Automate for real device testing at scale: BrowserStack’s cloud gave Schneider Electric on-demand access to thousands of real Android and iOS devices across a wide range of OS versions and hardware configurations, replacing the ten to fifteen physical devices in the lab with a device bank of effectively unlimited scale. Teams could spin up any required device combination immediately, without procurement, provisioning, or maintenance overhead.

2. Seamless integration with app delivery platforms: One of the most impactful early wins was BrowserStack’s seamless integration with Schneider Electric’s existing app delivery platforms, including App Center and TestFlight. Manual testers could immediately see which build, Android OS version, phone model, and iOS version they were testing against, and that context was automatically tagged in every report. When the same integration was extended to the test ops pipeline, automation scripts could automatically detect and use the correct build for each environment, making both manual and automated testing significantly more reliable and traceable.

3. Plug-and-play CI/CD integration: For the automation team, integrating BrowserStack App Automate into GitHub Actions required only changes to a YAML file. The entire setup was described by the team as a plug-and-play experience, with no significant rework of existing scripts or pipelines required.

4. Geolocation testing for region-specific products: Schneider Electric’s lab supports businesses whose products are not available in all markets. BrowserStack’s geolocation feature allowed the team to simulate device access from specific counries, enabling accurate testing of how apps behave on regional app stores and for users in different geographies, without requiring physical devices in those locations.

5. IP tunnelling for hardware-connected test scenarios: For test cases where mobile devices needed to be on the same network as physical hardware components, BrowserStack’s tunnelling capability allowed the lab to connect cloud devices and on-premise hardware on a shared network. This addressed one of the more complex testing requirements in Schneider Electric’s system testing environment, where apps interact directly with connected devices.

6. Video recording and logs for faster bug resolution: Every test execution on BrowserStack captured video recordings, network logs, and device logs automatically. Rather than having to rerun failed test cases to collect evidence for developers, the team could go directly from a nightly execution report to a documented bug submission, with the full session recording and logs already attached.

7. Self-healing agent for flakiness reduction: BrowserStack’s self-healing agent, currently in pilot at the lab, automatically detects and flags test cases where failures are caused by locator changes rather than genuine product defects, and proposes repairs under engineer review. Early results show meaningful flakiness reduction, and the team is actively working on integrating the agent more deeply into their broader system testing scripts.

Six years after first adopting BrowserStack App Automate, Schneider Electric’s India Customer & Innovation Lab continues to rely on it as the foundation of its mobile testing infrastructure. The platform now supports multiple lines of business across the organisation and has become the lab’s recommended testing platform for mobile app testing across Schneider Electric.

1. 10x increase in device coverage: From a starting point of ten to fifteen physical devices, Schneider Electric now has access to thousands of real devices across BrowserStack’s cloud. Test plans no longer need to be scoped down to fit available hardware, and the team can cover the full landscape of device and OS combinations that Schneider Electric’s products run on in the field.

2. 70% reduction in infrastructure maintenance overhead: The operational burden of managing, charging, updating, and provisioning physical devices has been reduced by 70%. While some physical devices are still maintained in the lab for specific Bluetooth and touch-and-feel testing scenarios, the vast majority of testing has moved to the cloud, freeing the team to focus on testing rather than infrastructure.

3. 50% reduction in bug reproduction time: With video recordings, network logs, and device logs captured automatically for every test execution, the team no longer needs to rerun failed cases to collect evidence. Bugs can be submitted to developers immediately after a nightly run with all supporting context already attached, cutting the time from failure detection to developer handoff by 50%.

4. 50% reduction in test flakiness: Consistent, reliable real device behaviour on BrowserStack’s cloud, combined with the early results from the self-healing agent pilot, has reduced test flakiness by 50%. Nightly executions now produce reports that the team can act on with confidence, rather than spending the following morning separating genuine failures from environment noise.

5. 50% faster triaging time: With session recordings and logs available immediately after a failure, the team can go into developer discussions already knowing what happened, on which device, and at which point in the flow. Conversations that previously began with reproducing the issue and piecing together what went wrong can now begin with root cause analysis, cutting triaging time by approximately 50%.

6. Distributed teams enabled to test anywhere, anytime: Teams across India, Canada, France, and the US can now access any device they need directly through BrowserStack, without waiting for a physical device to be shipped, provisioned, or freed up by another team member. This has been one of the most significant changes to how the lab supports Schneider Electric’s globally distributed product teams.

7. 90% probability of reproducing field issues on demand: When field issues are reported from customers or field service engineers on specific device configurations, the lab can now reproduce those issues on BrowserStack with approximately 90% reliability. This has transformed the lab’s ability to support Schneider Electric businesses with fast, evidence-based field issue resolution.

8. The lab is the centre of BrowserStack knowledge across Schneider Electric: Because the Customer Innovation Lab holds the BrowserStack licences and serves as the epicenter of mobile testing capability across the organisation, it has become the natural hub for recommending, educating, and enabling other Schneider Electric businesses to adopt the platform. The lab now actively shares BrowserStack knowledge and best practices across multiple lines of business within the organisation.