Hydra Lab: the next generation cross-platform software testing infrastructure open-sourced by Microsoft
GitHub — microsoft/HydraLab: Intelligent cloud testing made easy.
Testing is an essential step of modern software engineering workflow. The growing complexity of the apps and the constant focus towards DevOps for rapid development of reliable mobile apps are leading to an upsurge demand for efficient testing infrastructure. Apart from offering friendly DevOps system integration experience, an efficient infrastructure should also help us control the cost, uncover software defects timely, increase dev team productivity, thus improve the team agility and product quality. We discovered that there is still a blank when it comes to open-source solutions for clouding testing infrastructure. The existing open-source solutions either are targeted to solve the problems in specific layers or are still in PoC mode lacking in maintenance.
Therefore, we started the Hydra Lab project in 2022, which targeted to provide a more streamlined way, a self-served, and decentralized cloud testing platform that can enable engineering teams in tech giants/SMEs/start-ups to:
· Easily build a self-manageable mobile app cloud testing infrastructure with highly extensible managed test devices capacity at low cost to support an easier test automation integration, agile development, and quality-driven workflow.
· Further reduce manual testing and automated testing efforts by leveraging AI and RL (reinforcement learning) techniques integrated in the framework. (Exploratory intelligent test empowerment)
Eventually, we hope with the help of Hydra Lab the dev team can improve on both in app quality and team agility.
And in early 2023 Jan, the “microsoft/HydraLab: Intelligent cloud testing made easy” powering the automated testing of a series of Microsoft products (Phone Link, Link to Windows, Outlook mobile app, Microsoft Launcher, Edge mobile, Fluent UI, Office Mobile), is now publicly available on GitHub. Everyone now following the project README and wikis can easily build a self-manageable testing platform with integration of Azure DevOps, Jenkins or other CI/CD platforms.
In Microsoft, the cloud testing framework powered by Hydra Lab is now hosting 2000~6000 test cases run each week, and more than 20 Hydra Lab test agents are put up in Beijing, Suzhou, and India. It’s generating solid contribution by uncovering product bugs and COGS saving.
The project is still in its growth stage, it’s workable but not perfect. Therefore, your help and attention are wanted and valued. And we sincerely welcome you all mobile lovers/software testing experts to join the project, contribute, and make a difference for the software testing community.
