Adopting a new QA/Test automation framework isn’t for the faint of heart. Script-oriented tools like Selenium need specialized IT/Ops management. They need to be integrated closely with developer workflow; with build and deploy automation, with CI/CD infrastructure. Test scripts need to be coded, debugged, executed and actioned, maintained and extended -- this effort (actually these efforts, since end-to-end QA requires testing of every build, of release candidates, of canary deployments, of sites in service) running alongside product development, deployment, production operations, and requiring human resources of comparable expertise (and cost).
It can all start to feel very much like an IQ test.
That’s why, in building a business around our no-script, AI-driven autonomous testing platform, we wanted to move in a different direction. Our new collaborative customer engagement protocol, called IQ/Test, helps customers gain traction quickly with the Functionize platform: achieving dramatic productivity gains, broader and deeper QA insight, and lowering costs significantly -- often within the first 30-60 days.
An IQ/Test engagement begins with engineering discovery: where Functionize will perform an architectural design assessment of your existing QA process, test sets, costs, constraints, personnel, and goals. This is followed by a guided demonstration of Functionize, adapted to duplicate key existing tests, so you can see and explore the process of test creation in context relevant to your business and operations.
This is followed by iterating over a proposal for short-term collaboration, aimed at bringing your designated testers online as quickly and effectively as possible. Options for collaboration include:
Duplicating existing test sets - Operators experienced with Functionize can, in most cases, rapidly duplicate your existing, hand-coded test sets using interaction-recording techniques; regardless of test complexity. For example, at customer Minted, an e-commerce and online storefront service provider, a team of three Minted engineers, led by one Functionize engineer, was able to duplicate Minted’s entire, 500-test-case smoke suite in under 30 days. Within a month’s time, Minted was able to smoke-test their updates across all popular browsers in fully-automated fashion, despite complex, timing-dependent application flows spanning multiple payment-processing, fulfillment, and other service providers.
Generating new required tests - If your development effort is being held back -- perhaps by lack of a dedicated QA team, coupled with the complexity of script-oriented test automation tools -- Functionize can show you how to expand test coverage quickly, and help you keep testing in step with fast-paced releases. For our customer Hint, a SaaS-based Direct Care Administration service provider with a commitment to Agile development, our QA engineers were able to plan and build a suite of about 50 test cases on Functionize, enabling Hint testers to use command-line interfaces and CI/CD automation to trigger tests against containerized test deployments, getting results in minutes and pushing directly to production if all tests pass. Our team now maintains and updates their test-cases on a daily basis, leaving their developers to focus 100% on delivering new features.
Using Functionize AI to eliminate expensive manual testing - If complex test workflows are frustrating your attempts to create automated tests -- perhaps forcing use of expensive, time-consuming (and often error-prone) outsourced manual testing services, Functionize can help you bring this work in-house and get it automated quickly. For our client Zenefits, a SaaS HRIS provider, we helped their non-technical QA team swiftly automate a range of complex tests, exploiting Functionize machine vision and AI to help judge website visual correctness and perform other tasks that previously required human judgment.
Training and nurturing testers - Functionize is simple enough that non-technical personnel can use the platform to be as, or more productive in developing and executing tests than highly-trained and expensive QA/test engineers working with traditional scripted tools. A key goal of your Functionize IQ/Test engagement is training: enabling manual testers, admins, developers, and other non-QA-specialists to use the Functionize platform, and helping make AI-assisted automated testing a seamless, affordable, and readily scalable part of your development and operations process.
If you’ve been looking for better, faster, more economical ways of testing software, Functionize’s IQ/Test collaborative engagement can get you going in a hurry, with no wasted time, and no huge learning curve. For something with a name like ‘IQ/Test,’ it’s really sort of a no-brainer.
