Yahoo! strives to create highly personalized experiences for its users, and keep people connected to what matters most to them, across devices and around the world. To meet the demands of its users and continually introduce new updates and features, Yahoo! Mail adopted an agile modern software development framework that required automated testing as development teams checked in new code multiple times a day.

At one point the Yahoo! Mail team was hung up with testing infrastructure problems – a common problem for organizations in the business of writing user-facing code and not maintaining test infrastructure. The team maintained a grid of VMs, making it harder to run thousands of tests in parallel. In addition to constantly maintaining test infrastructure, another challenge was adding templates for new OS web browsers. This took considerable time, requiring assembly OS images and the security team to approve those images and hardware such as VMs. In order to keep up with the competition, the Yahoo! Mail team realized it had to adopt to the latest, modern application testing technology – automated testing – to increase its software release frequency and quality.

By adopting this type of testing tool, Yahoo! Mail was able to concentrate on writing user-facing product code, instead of getting tied up with maintaining test infrastructure to support new browser versions. Join Neil Manvar, solutions architect at Sauce Labs and former software engineer at Yahoo!, and Chris Riley, founder and DevOps analyst at Fixate.IO, for this session on Yahoo!’s previous web application testing challenges and how they were solved. You’ll learn strategies on building faster and higher quality apps and solutions designed to dramatically reduce time and energy spent worrying about infrastructure. By embracing automation testing, learn how Yahoo! has been able to stay connected with users in this rapid, ‘mobile-first’ era – a challenge many organizations today face.

Attendees will leave with the following takeaways:

- How Yahoo! Mail harnessed automated testing to maintain its test infrastructure, giving back more time and energy for the team to focus on other vital business operations

- How the shift towards cloud-based services, open-source technologies, and developers who write QA code is changing the face of Yahoo!

- Industry insights into how automation tools today promote testing effectiveness without increasing costs, thereby improving the QA—development relationships, bringing everyone closer to a real-time testing environment