According to conventional thinking, AI is about automating human tasks that require human intelligence. On the other side, much has been written about how AI eliminating many of today’s human jobs. Here is an article from the associated press which talks about 30 million U.S. workers losing their jobs to AI.
It is not surprising that we started SOFY as a testing platform with the goal of fully automating UI and functional testing of mobile apps. We infused the platform with lots of ML to add intelligence to our testing, so it does not face challenges of brute force automation techniques. However, as we talked with customers, we realized that complete automation, while a highly desired outcome, is very difficult to achieve without a custom approach. Even though our platform addressed significant pain points of our customers, we had set the expectation of full automation which left our customers wanting more. The customer reaction and feedback prompted us to take a step back and rethink our approach and we went back to the drawing board and redefined our goals. The result is our new release with 2 key features which we call SOFY Live and SOFY Automate.
To set the context, the default method for mobile app testing is a manual approach. Manual testing has minimal overhead or upfront costs compared to automation. Customers typically then invest in automation for repeatable scenarios, scale, and regression testing. Both manual and automated testing come with their own set of challenges.
In practice, any project will need a combination of manual and automated testing. The exact mix of these two approaches varies from project to project and depends on several factors including longevity of the app, level of app sophistication, the criticality of the app to a company’s business model, etc. Most test tools either focus on test automation or manual testing but not an approach that uses both testing methods effectively. This results in the following problems:
- Testers needing to learn two ways of executing test cases using two different sets of tools
- Insights and data obtained from manual testing is missing or insufficient
- The transition from manual to automation requires a considerable amount of rework
We wanted to take this challenge head-on. Our team with many years of QA experience had encountered the frustration of these problems first hand. While the purpose of testing is to help release quality software, we realized that our larger goal is to enable our customers to not just release quality software but also maintain high productivity. Here are some challenges we had to solve:
- Beyond testing and finding bugs, we need to provide insights into team productivity during a release cycle.
- We need to enable historical insights to help measure the quality of new releases. These insights include historically high-risk areas of the product that require deeper testing or devices which are causing the most issues, etc.
- We wanted to capture trending data of find and fix rates and create a comprehensive release sign-off report that can be shared with stakeholders.
The result is SOFY Live and SOFY Automate, a unique approach that clearly addresses these challenges in a novel way. SOFY Live is about augmenting manual testing with the intelligence of the SOFY platform and essentially transforming manual testing from the realm of the analog world to a digital world. SOFY Automate is a seamless extension of this augmented manual testing, enabling the team to gradually transition towards creating powerful automated testing and autonomous testing with NOCODE and using the power of AI. The more the SOFY platform learned about the app, the smarter it got about determining how to test and find bugs by understanding the changes to an app and creating test cases to increase test coverage.
Our customers, who have experienced the new solution, really love it. We are excited to announce the general availability of SOFY Live and SOFY Automate, we hope you will try it out and provide your feedback.
Attend our next webinar on March 24 to learn more about how you can accelerate your testing and increase team productivity through SOFY Live and SOFY Automate so testing is no longer a bottleneck to on-time release of your software.
