Remote Test Lab Setup: Best Practices For Testing Across Multiple Geographies

Modern apps require that you run them on multiple devices, browsers, and other software configurations. By implementing this process, you can ensure that you are providing a consistent experience to all your customers. However, it is almost impossible to incorporate all these hardware and software configurations in a physical environment. The best solution to this problem is the inclusion of a remote test lab.

If you properly configure this lab, it will allow you to perform comprehensive testing across various regional environments. These test cases will also account for differences in devices, networks, and operating systems. You can also incorporate various user preferences to further customize the test results.

If you’re trying to understand the best practices for testing across multiple geographies using a remote test lab, this is the perfect article for you. Here, we will describe the essential steps and best practices for creating a robust and scalable remote test lab.

Understanding the Need for a Remote Test Lab

Before we start discussing all the best practices and setup processes for a remote test lab, we must have a clear understanding of why you should even consider incorporating this lab.

It is needless to say that the experiences of your users will vary depending on geographical factors like network latency, device usage patterns, regional compliance standards, and language preferences.

By using a remote test lab, you can run your testing scenarios across various virtual environments to replicate these conditions in the target regions. This approach will help ensure that your application behaves as expected, irrespective of the preferences of your users.

Let us now divert our attention towards some other major advantages of incorporating remote testing

• Remote testing allows you to implement localized testing to replicate real-world user conditions to support testing for languages, data formats, currency, and many other factors.
• It also helps you to implement to network simulation for testing on different bandwidths and latency rates.
• By implementing remote testing, you can ensure adherence to various regional regulations like GDPR in Europe and CCPA in California. These factors are very important to ensure that your company or application does not face a geographical ban.
• The diversity of devices and testing configurations will allow the implementation of an inclusive testing strategy.

Choosing the Right Tools and Infrastructure

To properly utilize the full potential of a remote test lab, you must choose the right tools and infrastructure. This is because these tools will have a specific role in utilizing the testing potential and also the specific requirements of your application development project.

Let us shift our attention towards some of the most important considerations that you must keep in mind while choosing these tools:

Cloud-Based Test Labs 

In the current market, you will come across various cloud platforms which will allow you access to a wide range of devices and browser versions. These tools will also allow the teams to perform cross-platform testing and cross-browser testing across multiple geographies without requiring them to set up a physical device.

To further improve our understanding of this step, let us divert our attention toward LambdaTest as our reference discussion point:

LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that lets you perform manual and automation testing at scale with over 3000 real devices, browsers, and OS combinations.  This online device farm will also allow you to access legacy devices and outdated browser versions for a more inclusive testing strategy.

LambdaTest also has a decisive role in the debugging and troubleshooting process as it generates a comprehensive test report consisting of various media elements like screenshots and videos. All these inclusions are aimed at helping you quickly locate the faulty elements and implement the resolution steps.

Network Simulation Tools

There are also various network simulation tools like Charles Proxy and Wireshark, which will allow you to implement the test cases under different network conditions. These tools will also allow you to simulate high latency or low bandwidth environments that are specific to various geographic regions.

Version Control and CI/CD Tools

Version control tools are mainly integrated with continuous integration and continuous development tools like Jenkins and GitLab. These tools allow you to implement consistent deployment across all environments. The primary goal of this process is to maintain the code integrity and also ensure future scalability for the application.

Infrastructure Recommendations

We would also like to recommend the testers to consider incorporating the following infrastructure to properly implement our remote test lab:

• A cloud setup will be a great choice to reduce the need for physical machines and also improve the scalability of the entire software testing infrastructure.
• It is also wise to ensure secure access across various locations while maintaining the speed and accessibility of the application.
• Finally, you must consider using technologies like Docker. These technologies will allow you to implement consistent testing environments to ensure easy replication of the test code across various regions and testing environments.

Establishing the Test Lab Environment

It is very important to create a secure and reliable test environment to conduct realistic testing across various regions of your target audience. To help you more in this segment, we have created a list of all the steps that you can follow to achieve this goal:

1. The first step is to pinpoint the regions that require focused testing. You can create this list by analyzing the user data, app usage, and various network changes.

2. Next, you have to move on to setting up the virtual machines, which will help you to replicate the operating systems, browsers, and device configurations. You must ensure that these configurations must be specific to your target region.

3. After this, you must use a specific network simulation tool to emulate real-world conditions. These conditions can include 4G networks or 5G networks and even Wi-Fi variations. We also suggest the testers to incorporate older network bandwidth like 3G, as certain users might be still using it.

The final step in this process is to ensure that you have implemented all the required privacy policies on your remote lab setup. A useful tip would be to constantly monitor these privacy regulations with every application update or any change within the app infrastructure.

Implementing Automation in Remote Test Labs

Modern apps consist of thousands of different elements that require thorough testing. It will become a hectic and almost impossible task to manually verify the performance of these elements individually. So, to resolve this issue, we suggest the inclusion of automation testing.

To ensure that you are properly implementing this process, you must choose frameworks which support remote testing and also allow you to integrate the test instances across multiple geographies.

Let us understand some of the major automation testing frameworks and tools that you can consider for achieving this goal:

• Selenium Grid is a very popular, effective, and simple-to-use tool which will provide access to a distributed network of browsers and operating systems. It uses the principle of a hub that is connected to several nodes for implementing automated remote testing across multiple configurations.
• To implement this process on mobile applications, you can use Appium, as it will allow you to perform cross-platform mobile testing on both iOS and Android platforms. The major advantage of this tool is that it uses the same API for multiple platforms.
• Finally, we suggest the testers to consider adding the automation scripts with Jenkins or CircleCI to trigger the tests based on various activities like code commits. This implementation will help you to ensure faster feedback loops so that you can reduce the time to market for your app.

Best Practices for Automation in Multi-Regional Testing

Now that we have finished understanding how can you set up a remote test lab, we must divert our focus towards some of the most important practices that we must incorporate to utilize the full potential of this configuration:

• It is important to write the automation scripts which account for region-specific variations. These variations can include language changes, time zone changes, and currency variables.
• We suggest the testers to automate language checks, right-to-left support, and regionalized formats. This implementation will help prevent localized errors on your application.
• Finally, you must use data sets which reflect the diversity of regional user profiles. This approach will assist you in comprehensive and inclusive testing processes on your application.

Maintaining Security and Compliance

The final step in this process is to ensure its proper security and data compliance on a web application. This process becomes especially significant when conducting tests in different regions with various laws and regulations.

To further shed more light over this segment, we have listed a series of steps which will help you maintain secure and compliant testing environments on a remote setup:

• The first step is to use encryption protocols for all data transmission and data storage processes. So, this protocol will assist you in protecting sensitive user information against all forms of malicious attacks.
• It is also important to implement strict access policies. To implement this step, you can consider using role-based access control for limiting the permissions within the test lab. The simple definition of this process is that all the members of your team can access only that much data that is required in their specific role.
• We recommend using virtual private networks and multi-factor authentication protocols. This implementation will help you ensure secure and verified access to regional environments. VPNs also act as an extra layer of security that protects your connection and data transmission processes.
• To ensure compliance with privacy regulations, you must implement local data storage permissions and also content management for user data.

The Bottom Line

Based on all the factors that we put forward in this article, we can safely say that a well-designed remote test lab setup will allow the testers to confidently deliver software which meets the needs of users across the globe. Moreover, by understanding the challenges of each region and implementing secure, scalable, and efficient testing practices, app-developing companies can provide a reliable and consistent user experience.

It is also important for the testers to understand that the requirements of the app developing industry are constantly evolving. So, it is very important for you to update yourself regarding all the upcoming trends and innovations in this segment. You should always remember that the final goal as a tester is to provide the best end-user experience to your customers and create a positive brand reputation.