Dear Sofy community,
Happy New Year! Please join me in taking a moment to look back over the last year, and consider what made it such a great year for Sofy. Additionally, I’d like to make a few predictions for 2023.
2022: Major advances and shifts in the app testing landscape
A major factor that greatly assisted the success of Sofy over the course of 2022 was the huge demand for no-code and low-code solutions. The need for no-code and low-code solutions became a particularly big talking point over the last few years due to prolonged industry staffing difficulties and, during the last quarter or two of the year especially, a massive increase in companies looking for clear returns on investment during economically uncertain times.
Although many in the tech sector took a big hit this year, because Sofy is great for solving both staffing needs and ROI, I’m very pleased to say that Sofy was in an excellent position in both circumstances. The Sofy community has grown by leaps and bounds!
And we’re just getting started: The No-Code Revolution marches on. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2026, developers outside of formal IT departments will account for at least 80% of the low-code development user base. This is an increase from 60% in 2021.
Since the inception of Sofy, we’ve understood that software test automation must also evolve from manual testing to manually-coded automation to no-code test automation.
Indeed, we know that a successful mobile app must maintain a high velocity of releases through several different app stores, all while entirely avoiding decreasing release quality. For a truly successful app, increase quality should only increase.
We also know that—for perfectly understandable reasons—this need has historically been a big challenge that has only grown in time, as apps become increasingly complex and users continue to expect more from the apps, and especially those that they’ve come to depend upon. The pressure is certainly there!
The Sofy team believes that this can only be accomplished one way, and that has been our 2022 focus: To make it as easy as possible for anyone in your mobile app product development team—whether engineering, quality assurance, product, or other—to create automation, execute at scale, receive actionable insights from test runs, and maintain it all as the product changes and evolves over time.
With our dual focus on ease-of-ease and scale in mind, we’re both pleased to see the adoption of no-code in areas we haven’t seen before. And some we hadn’t expected!
Product and company milestones
Over the course of 2022, Sofy hit the following milestones:
- The Sofy community collectively surpassed three million minutes of testing on the Sofy platform.
- Searching failures and issues in mobile apps, Sofy has now processed over a whopping 4.5 million app screenshots.
- We’re proud to say that we’ve now surpassed over 30,000 apps tested on the Sofy platform.
Given where Sofy was just a year ago, this is mind-blowing to think about. We’re so glad to have our excellent community.
Product feature delivery
Every single day the past year, our focus has been on a single goal: To make Sofy the number one platform for end-to-end no-code mobile app testing. To that end, we’ve placed intense focus on lab management (that is, real devices), no-code automation authoring, and executing at scale directly from CI/CD.
Over the course of 2022, the Sofy team delivered:
- Over 100 brand new features: At every corner, our goal is to innovate whenever and wherever possible, all with the goal of making a tester’s life easier with each update.
- A supercharged self-service experience: With Sofy, now anyone can sign up and test your app within minutes on physical—yes, real—devices from anywhere in the world. (And if you haven’t already, you can try this now here!)
- Advanced physical device management: In addition to the above, our advanced device management also allows you to employ advanced gestures subset responses on all actions.
- Even more no-code power: No-code creation for dynamic, hybrid, and native apps, and mobile browsers. With Sofy, you can validate every screen without writing a single line of code.
- Major testing capability enhancements: Big testing improvements to the Sofy platform include the introduction of API steps, templates, reordering and disabling steps, and control updates.
- Swift new OS support: The Sofy team was especially quick to provide support for iOS 16 and Android 13, and we’re already preparing for the next round of major OS releases.
- Seamless CI/CD integration: Sofy easily integrates with all popular CI/CD setups and bug tracking platforms, allowing you to plug into your workflow and get right to work.
And those are just a few examples—our tireless engineering team never ceases to impress me!
Behind the scenes: Sofy company developments
In addition to the above, I’m very happy to say that Sofy also received funding from top venture capitalists. This excellent news made a significant splash in the industry (here’s a quick example). Read all about it here!
We also attended a variety of events (check out my presentation at Droidcon London here) and we appeared on a variety of podcasts (check out this episode of the Dream Team Podcast, featuring yours truly).
Look for much more of this in the coming year!
Looking forward to 2023: Three predictions
Finally, now that 2022 has come to a close, it’s time to look ahead to the horizon and make a few predictions for the new year.
Yet before we look ahead, I want to highlight that the typical DevOps approach is one that contains far, far too many manual processes. This is inefficient, difficult to scale, and all too often yields inconsistent results.
Additionally, as mentioned above, there’s the ongoing issue of staffing: It’s tough to hire engineers for the sole purpose of writing automation.
With that in mind, here are my three big predictions of 2023:
- No-code and low-code in DevOps will become more mainstream: While no-code and low-code solutions have made tremendous headway over the past year, I expect this will only amplify over the next year. Expect to see far more dependence on no-code and low-code solutions in the DevOps space moving forward.
- AI-based generation of test cases: ChatGPT and similar advances indicate that we’re even closer to truly intelligent testing, where a few inputs yield thorough testing results. Exactly when purely AI-based test generation will arrive remains unclear but we’re clearly taking major steps forward in this direction.
- No-code test development and execution: And it’s not just DevOps but testing in general, which is time-consuming, resource-heavy, and yet crucial for the success of any product. I predict that testing will greatly accelerate toward no-code automation platforms that make it easier to create tests, execute, and run at scale.
Most importantly, thank you!
Finally, I’d like to end this letter with a hearty thank you to the tireless Sofy team. Sofy has grown like never before this year while advancing forward at a head-spinning speed.
None of this would be possible without you, and I’m so excited for what we’re going to accomplish over the next year.
Thank you—and here’s to a wonderful 2023!
Sincerely,
Syed Hamid
Founder & CEO, Sofy
Bellevue, Washington
