Sauce Labs Makes Selenium Simple with Sauce RC 1.0

by Kristin Shoemaker - Feb. 12, 2010Comments (2)

Despite the fact that open source software is often criticized for offering too many choices, it's safe to say that people like to have options. This doesn't pertain solely to end-users -- developers, designers, and quality assurance professionals all have their personal preferences when it comes to development framework and languages.

That's where it tends to get complicated. Selenium Remote Control is an open source cross-browser, cross-platform functional testing framework. However, it's a testing tool geared primarily toward developers with automated functional testing and continuous integration processes in place. Installing, configuring and maintaining the Selenium framework takes precious resources away from application development and testing.

Today, Sauce Labs released its Sauce RC (Remote Control) 1.0 utility. It's a simple web interface enabling QA professionals and harried developers to easily configure, administer, and test their applications on Selenium.

Choosing a testing framework is a monumental decision -- it takes time and effort, and it has an enormous impact on how smoothly the software development process flows.

This is why Sauce Labs' Senior Director of Development, Steve Hazel, believes Sauce RC 1.0 is a good match for web application developers and quality assurance testers who are familiar with unit testing, but haven't had the opportunity to incorporate automated functional testing into their continuous integration process.

Easier administration of remote test servers within an organization is certainly a strength, but it isn't the only reason to consider Sauce RC 1.0. Sauce RC 1.0 can be used with the cloud service Sauce OnDemand.

Sauce RC is a free download for Mac and Windows. Sauce RC 1.0 includes Selenium RC 1.0.1 with additional open-sourced features (licensed under the Apache 2.0 terms). Commercial licensing and tiered support packages are optionally available for on-premises and on demand (cloud) Sauce users.