Simona Weinglass, GeekTime
In an ideal world, you’d be able to develop an app or a piece of software and launch it into the world the next day. But as companies like Apple learned the hard way, you can never test your new software enough.
“In the world that we live in today, a brand’s reputation is highly dependent on the quality of the digital experiences it provides its customers, how those meet expectations,” Doron Reuveni, CEO of Applause, told Geektime. In other words, you can’t have bugs in your app, but you can’t take too long to get it to market. So what’s a company to do?
Applause recently announced a major new offering to its suite of app quality tools and services that it hopes will resolve this pain point. The service is called Applause Test Automation, which includes everything from the automation framework to a team of experts to engineer the scripts. While it’s not meant to replace human testing, the turnkey solution allows specific testing scenarios to be automated.
“It’s a simulated program that works on real devices or devices in the cloud,” explained Reuveni. “We provide a whole service of actually creating the simulation and providing those devices. So it’s a fully managed service.”
The company explained in a press release that if a company wanted to automate their testing, they would face long-term, big money contracts with a vendor of proprietary tools and/or device access. On top of that, companies still had to create automation scripts and maintain them as their apps changed.
With Applause’s solution, companies can get the software tools, the device access and the expert services, the company’s press release explained. Applause customers detail their desired test scenarios, and Applause takes it from there. After Applause creates the scripts and abstraction layer, the customer owns them. There is no lock-in to closed or proprietary technology, and no long-term contractual commitments.
“The company always has the option to take it on, as they own the scripts and abstraction layer uniquely created for them. And if they want us to manage the process for them, which we believe they will, they can decide that as well. But our offering now empowers them to have the freedom to make that decision.”
And this, according to Reuveni, is nothing short of “reinventing the modern test automation landscape.”
Why automation?
Applause has a “community” of more than 175,000 professional testers around the world that test apps “in-the-wild,” Reuveni explained, meaning in real-life environments and configurations.
“Because when I order coffee [from a restaurant app], it’s different if I do it if I’m sitting in my office using WiFi, or if I’m on the train to Tel Aviv ordering it while I’m on a 3G network.”
Reuveni said that he sees separate roles for both automation and the professional testers in the Applause community.
“We believe that automation can cover some core and large-scale scenarios, but in order to ensure the real quality across the board, you kind of need both: You need the in-the-wild community-based testing that we’re doing, that’s manual, human-based. And you need the automation as well to cover the basic scenarios. You really need both. And that’s what we provide as a 360° app quality company.”
Reuveni says that his company’s more than 2,500 customers can benefit from this automation because, “If I’m an app developer, the real competitive advantage that I have is the capability to release new functionality faster and quicker to market.”
He says that the greatest inhibitor of releasing something more quickly to market is ensuring quality. Developers can develop code pretty quickly, but every time you put code or software in the hands of real users, there’s a serious risk.
Applause is not yet profitable but is growing “close to 100 percent year over year.” The company has tens of millions of dollars in revenue per year and has raised $80 million so far in six funding rounds.
What this automation feature will do, Reuveni hopes, “is provide more solutions and more value to our customers, and it will allow us to continue and even accelerate our growth as a company.”