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· 5 min read

The WebdriverIO community is on the verge of an exciting new era, supported by strategic partnerships with BrowserStack and Sauce Labs, along with continuous support from other sponsors like LambdaTest. This collective endeavor signifies a crucial milestone for the WebdriverIO project, as we utilize these additional resources to foster the growth and enrichment of our ecosystem.

Towards a Sustainable Open Source Model

WebdriverIO's story began with its inception into the JS Foundation in 2017, which later evolved into the OpenJS Foundation. Since then, it has thrived as an open-governed, community-driven endeavor, witnessing continuous growth in NPM downloads, the introduction of innovative plugins and reporters, and the rollout of new functionalities. This expansion is a testament to the hard work and dedication of the global testing community, including project users and contributors from leading testing cloud providers.

WebdriverIO's core principle is its dedication to open governance, an aspect that has attracted the trust and confidence of its users, especially those in the enterprise world. The project's growth has been organic, independent of Venture Capital, corporate objectives and sales requirements, guaranteeing that its development aligns with the true needs of our user community and all features remain free of charge.

With the project's continuous expansion, marked by increasing NPM downloads, new functionalities, plugins, and reporters, the importance of nurturing a healthy and sustainable growth path has never been more critical. Our recent alliances with top cloud services for automated testing demonstrate our dedication to responsibly managing these resources, with the aim to widen our network of contributors and enrich the entire ecosystem.

Introducing the Stipend Program

Central to our ethos is the belief that financial support of the WebdriverIO ecosystem is a worthy endeavor. Whether it's the occasional contributions from casual participants or the continuous dedication of our core team members, every contribution is a building block of our project's success. Currently, the project benefits from a monthly donation inflow of $3,879, sourced through various channels like Tidelift, Thanks.dev, GitHub Sponsors, and our Open Collective. These funds have empowered the Technical Steering Committee to finalize new governance policies, outlining our strategic approach to fund allocation.

Our monthly budget is allocated across four key areas:

  • Project Development receives the largest share, with 60% of the funds dedicated to fostering growth and innovation.
  • Travel and Event Expenses account for 20%, supporting our participation in and hosting of industry events and meetups.
  • Support Systems are allocated 10% of the budget, ensuring our infrastructure and community support mechanisms remain robust.
  • Lastly, Dependencies, crucial external projects and tools we rely on, also receive 10% of our financial resources.

Dedication to Project Development

Our financial strategy gives top priority to project development, dedicating 60% of our resources to it. This funding aims to draw contributions from a wide range of people, increasing our base of dedicated contributors. By dividing the funds, allocating 35% to individuals not directly involved with the project and 65% to our project contributors and the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) members, we seek to foster a strong sense of community and shared ownership. This approach is vital for ensuring the long-term prosperity and stability of our project.

As part of this strategy, we have developed an automated expense process using a GitHub Action to help run this program. You can read more about how this process works on my personal blog.

Supporting Community Engagement and Events

Recognizing the importance of community engagement, especially in the aftermath of Covid-19, we are allocating funds towards travel and event expenses. This decision emphasizes our commitment to creating user meetups and supporting the broader community in hosting WebdriverIO-related events. It reflects our desire to not only maintain but also to strengthen the community ties that form the backbone of our project.

Enhancing Support Systems

A small fraction of our monthly budget is allocated to various essentials that support our project's community growth and upkeep. Our intention is to invest in translating our documentation and financially support those who contribute to this effort. Additionally, we aim to cover ongoing costs for infrastructure needed to host project-related materials, as well as provide our maintainers with the software tools necessary to enhance their contributions to the project.

Acknowledging Dependencies

Finally, we're committed to giving back to the projects and communities that are crucial to WebdriverIO's success. We believe it's vital for open-source projects benefiting from generous donations to support their key dependencies. Thanks to Thanks.dev, we can identify and financially support our most critical dependencies based on their significance to our project and the funds we allocate monthly for this purpose. Noteworthy dependencies include:

  • Individual open-source champions like Sindre Sorhus and isaacs, whose contributions to various dependencies are invaluable.
  • The Vite ecosystem: we use Vitest across almost all our projects, and we couldn't provide such powerful component testing capabilities without Vite under the hood
  • The Eslint project and its related ecosystem projects are fundamental to maintaining a high code quality of our projects and have significantly inspired our contributor stipend program.

Looking Ahead

As we embrace this new chapter, we're excited about the prospects of accelerating growth through strategic investments in our community and project. The early feedback from our initiatives has been overwhelmingly positive, and we are committed to refining our processes for even greater efficiency and transparency.

Twitter Excitement

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to our sponsors for their invaluable support, and we warmly welcome further sponsorship to join us in this journey. Together, we are setting the stage for an even brighter future for WebdriverIO and its thriving ecosystem.

· 2 min read

We are thrilled to announce an exciting development in our journey towards innovation in software testing and quality assurance. Sauce Labs, a pioneering force in the continuous testing arena, is joining forces with us through our Partnership Program. This collaboration marks a significant milestone in our quest to expand our development fund, enabling us to enhance our work on major releases and introduce groundbreaking features yet to be unveiled.

Sauce Labs has earned a reputation as a leader in providing solutions that empower organizations worldwide to achieve excellence in software delivery. Their platform, trusted by thousands of development teams, ensures that digital products function seamlessly across every browser, operating system, and device. This commitment to quality guarantees a flawless user experience, showcasing Sauce Labs' dedication to software excellence.

The company has been technically sponsoring the project almost since day one. My early work on WebdriverIO has opened an opportunity to work at Sauce Labs and during my 7-year tenure there, I was allowed and encouraged to work on this framework. Even some of Sauce Labs products have been heavily inspired by the work in WebdriverIO, e.g. their performance testing and extended debugging capabilities.

It makes me personally very happy to see Sauce Labs staying invested in the Open-Source testing ecosystem. Being the originators of Selenium and creators of Appium Sauce Labs remains a strong supporter of open-governed tools like WebdriverIO.

Thank you 🙏

· 2 min read

We are thrilled to share some fantastic news: WebdriverIO and BrowserStack have embarked on a groundbreaking partnership, set to significantly boost the development and community engagement of our project!

BrowserStack is the world’s leading software testing platform powering over two million tests every day across 15 global data centers. BrowserStack helps Tesco, Shell, NVIDIA, Discovery, Wells Fargo, and over 50,000 customers deliver quality software at speed by moving testing to their Cloud. BrowserStack’s platform provides instant access to 3,000+ real mobile devices and browsers on a highly reliable cloud infrastructure that effortlessly scales as testing needs grow. With BrowserStack, Dev and QA teams can move fast while delivering an amazing experience for every customer.

In an exciting turn, BrowserStack has become an exclusive Premium Sponsor for WebdriverIO, providing crucial funding that supplements our primarily user-generated donations. This generous support enables us to advance significant initiatives, including our upcoming major release. For the first time, we can offer financial recognition to our devoted community contributors, acknowledging their invaluable efforts toward the project's triumph. We will soon share more information on how we will use the project funds and how we plan to distribute them.

As a token of this collaboration, BrowserStack is extending a special free trial license to all WebdriverIO users. Discover more about this incredible offer at browserstack.com.

Since its inception, WebdriverIO has been propelled by a dedicated group of developers, united by a passion for crafting tools that enhance software quality. While other testing projects have benefited from substantial venture capital and corporate funding, WebdriverIO has predominantly relied on its vibrant community, without the means to provide significant financial compensation for contributions.

The core contributors of WebdriverIO are elated about this partnership. We are profoundly grateful to BrowserStack for their commitment to nurturing open-governed, open-source projects like ours.

Thank you 🙏

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