Software has become a prevasive part of our life. For all the good that it does we have to cope with its failures every day. Most of time these are just annoying. Sometimes failures become extremely damaging to our business and our reputation. Occasionally, software failues turn outright dangerous for people and environment.
As software producers we have a reputation to defend. Delivering highest possible quality is essential for our business to survive. We at Testup have joined this struggle for quality.
This is how we do it.
The complexity of software is permanently increasing. We are living in an ecosystem of third party providers, cloud infrastructure and more dependencies. This complexity exceeds the capacity of individual humans to fully capture. Even the smallest change that we make in one place can have unpredictable consequences anywhere in the system. The dream of fully proven and error free software has evaporated.
Checking all features of the software after each change is an extremely repetitive and boring task. Obviously, this is a prime target for automation. As we accept that bugs cannot be fully avoided, we have a new target: We have to catch the bugs as early as possible.
With fast reports on any upcoming issues we stand a chance
This goal can only be achieved with full automation and robot farms that permanentely check the software with all its features.
The biggest challenge of full end-to-end test automation is full cross company integration.
With one piece missing, nothing can be tested.
End-to-end testing is the most frequently reported bottle neck in QA. It is not only the most callenging but also the most comprehensive test:
It’s challenge lies in the required coordination of all specialized teams. It’s coverage is the most comprehensive, because its the only place where all components are deployed before going to production.
Unsurprisingly this type of test is the least automated. The tedious and repetitive task of testing the application is often done manually: Under current circumstances only humans can reliably decide if any change is an indented new feature or if it is an accidental regression. This fundamental task does in itself not require any deeper technical skill. In fact it requires empathy with the users and their their use cases. Hence, any test automation system for end-to-end testing must be made easy to use for non-technical people and that is why we started with Testup.
Image detection and object recognition are probably the fastest growing fields in computer science. Finding interactable objects and understanding an interaction pattern have now become within reach of what computer can do. We wanted to create a test automation solution where you show the robot how to interact and the robot shows you what it did. Everything is visual: No code and no cryptic error messages.
Many test automation solutions perform well as long as all tests pass. The solutions become cumbersome when tests fail and cryptic error reports must be interpreted. Most annoying, however, is the frequent case where the test fails despite the software being ok. Not only do most automation solutions lack the required intelligence to detect minor variations in the displayed content, they also lack a browsable representation of the test steps.
Navigating a test procedure and a test report is like watching images or videos. It works even with hundreds of test steps.
The focus on visual interaction appears as a limitation at first. However, it has a number of clear advantages:
Test procedures are easy to read and navigate.
Test reports are easy to interpret.
Test methodology is independent of the device type; desktops, mobile and web can be automated in the same way.
Direct access to desktop and mobile apps comes as a big advantage over many no-code test solutions. There is a common case where non-trivial calculations need to be made during the automation. Testup allows you to seemlessly automate a switch to Excel. There is no need to include custom scripts.
We are veterans from the early days of the computer revolution. We still remember the time when we could run entire codes in our head and could easily pinpoint any failure to its cause. Time has moved on, but we still love code. The new world has made software more exciting to us, not less.
Our experience in the field of software development has crossed our paths with the experts from various fields. We love to work with specialists from various disciplins, such as engineering, finance, health, construction, logistics and more. We think that software should enable you to run the industry. We are here to help.
The software industry has become faster, more competetive, but most importantly it is growing. It has become less reliable, sometimes chaotic and much less predictable. Nonetheless, it remains exciting.
Also feel free to test the cloud version of our testing service.
Get in touch with us for a custom arrangement.
