SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 11/06/12 -- Sauce Labs Inc., the leading provider of web application testing solutions for software developers, today announced that the success of its Mobile Testing Summit, which was held Nov. 1, demonstrated the growing demand for new solutions and skills in the mobile testing industry. The event, the first of its kind, exceeded initial audience estimates by 60 percent and helped shed new light on the growing importance of testing the applications used on mobile devices.

The one-day event in San Francisco brought together leading experts in mobile testing from some of the most well known consumer and enterprise brands to probe advances in testing technologies, emerging techniques and best practices. On the lineup were speakers from Bendyworks, Code for America, eBay, Facebook, Intuit, Mozilla, Salesforce.com, Thoughtworks, the University of Colorado at Boulder, LessPainful and Zoosk. The broad mix of organizations represented in the lineup for the inaugural event was further demonstration of how mobile technologies have taken on significant meaning across multiple industries.

"Businesses increasingly interact with their customers through mobile apps and their predictable operation has become critical for brand integrity yet as a field of expertise, mobile testing is just emerging," John Dunham, CEO of Sauce Labs, said. "The Mobile Testing Summit was our effort to support the development of mobile testing as a community."

Summit attendees chose the event to unveil new contributions to the Selenium open source project. Selenium, which automates browsers for application testing, was originally authored by Sauce Labs CTO Jason Huggins. Jason kicked off the event with a "top ten" points to think about for creating excellent mobile test automation.

Dan Cuellar of Zoosk then introduced a new contribution known as Appium. With contributions from Huggins, the newly released Appium allows for automated testing of mobile apps for iOS devices using Selenium without prompting developers to modify the app. Until now, the Apple-supported javascript automation functioned in a sandbox forcing developers to use it only in isolation. Cuellar shared how he found a way to separate UIAuto from the sandbox and integrate it with more powerful tools.

For details and information on how to contribute to the project visit https://github.com/sauce-labs/Appium.

Other notable presentations during the summit included one from Luke Inman-Semerau of Salesforce.com on iPhoneDriver. The iPhone driver allows testing on a UIWebView (a webkit browser accessible for third party applications) on the iPhone. It works through an iPhone application running on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPhone simulator. Mozilla developer Malini Das presented on the Marionette project. The goal of this project is to integrate the Selenium WebDriver protocol directly onto the phone. This gives developers the ability to remotely connect to and control running devices or emulated device instances.

François Reynaud of eBay also shared iOS Driver for Native apps, proving that automating the testing of native and hybrid apps is a major pain point and area for further development within the community. Highlighting the afternoon, Damien Sereni from Facebook gave the audience an inside view of how Facebook engineers test mobile platforms while maintaining rapid deployment cycles.

The sold-out Mobile Testing Summit was hosted by Sauce Labs and industry leaders in software development and mobile, including CISimple, Cloudbees, eBay, Facebook, Lookout, Salesforce.com, Walmart.com and Workday.

Additional Online Resources
Mobile Testing Summit 2012: http://www.mobiletestsummit.com/
Follow @saucelabs on Twitter: https://twitter.com/saucelabs

About Sauce Labs
Sauce Labs, the leading web application testing company, provides cloud-based testing tools that greatly increase developer productivity. Sauce Labs' automated testing service lets users run Selenium tests across multiple browsers in parallel without setting up or maintaining test infrastructure. Its manual testing service lets users interactively test their websites on more than 75 browser/OS combinations while recording screenshots and videos of bugs. To date, more than 20 million tests have run in the Sauce cloud. Sauce Labs is headquartered in San Francisco, California. For more information, visit http://saucelabs.com.