Gauge made test automation easy at Luminate - a case study

About Luminate Security

Luminate Security a Symantec company, enables security and IT teams to create a Zero Trust Application Access architecture without traditional VPN appliances. Luminate’s products are used to securely connect any user from any device, anywhere in the world to corporate applications, on-premises and in the cloud, while all other corporate resources are cloaked without granting access to the entire network.

Finding a Test Automation Framework that fits

Luminate uses modern software development practices to build and deliver product features in short release cycles and commit to a high (99.99%) SLA. Automated testing helps them meet their business goals.

Until about two years ago, Luminate used SaltStack for test automations. However, they found writing and maintaining tests difficult because

Developers found it difficult to understand and re-use existing test workflow
Developers were reluctant to write acceptance tests

They started evaluating other tools for test automation to overcome these challenges. They tried Gauge since it is from ThoughtWorks, where Selenium was created.

How test automation became easy with Gauge

Gauge has a low learning curve, and this helped the team at Luminate adopt and use it extensively.

Today acceptance tests are being written for all the features that are being developed ^{- Jonathan Giber,
Automation Leader, Luminate Security}

Developers now find it easy to understand tests

With test cases written in plain text, even new people on the team can get started easily, understand the workflow and add tests.
Developers can easily identify reusable test code

In gauge, steps are plain text abstractions of test code. With this, the developers can easily understand the intent of the underlying code. This is very useful to identify reusable elements and reduce redundant test code.
Running tests in parallel is now easy

Luminate found switching between sequential and parallel runs surprisingly simple. Other functionalities like reporting work seamlessly on either mode. This made running tests in parallel locally or on CI servers, easy.
Extending Gauge to build custom features

Using Gauge’s extensible architecture, Luminate built an analytics dashboard capable of visualizing Gauge’s test execution results over a period of time.

Dashboard showing the number of failures over a given period When there is a variance in data, a custom plugin sends a notification via email or slack.

Alert sent when there was a dramatic degradation in the success rate

Luminate’s choice of Gauge as a main testing automation platform proved to be successful. Gauge isn’t just a software product, it is also a caring and attentive team, who always strives to understand customer needs and is capable of delivering functionality in an agile way to support these needs. ^{- Leonid Belkind,
Co-founder & CTO, Luminate Security}

Luminate has been using Gauge for over 2 years now. They started using Gauge when it was still in beta and have now extended its use beyond browser automation. Today, the team uses Gauge for automating browser based as well as mobile user journeys, API tests, and performance tests.

Your teams too can enjoy the benefits of Gauge and it’s extensible architecture. Try Gauge (it’s free and open source) and start writing tests in under 5 minutes.

Symantec has acquired Luminate Security. To know more about Luminate Security and the services they offer, visit the Symatec website.