How Testsigma simplifies software test automation with open source

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While every company might well be a software company these days, the pressure to ship new features and products as part of a continuous delivery cycle vastly increases the likelihood of bugs entering the production codebase. This is partly why the global test automation market was pegged as a $20.7 billion sector in 2021, a figure that’s touted to more than double within four years.

Test automation, for the uninitiated, is the process of carrying out repeatable tests on software automatically, saving valuable time and resources — this could involve so-called “regression testing,” which checks that previously tested software still works as intended after a change is made to the codebase, or “cross-browser” testing to verify that an application works equally across different browser and device configurations.

There are no shortage of test automation products out there in the wild already, but one fledgling company is setting out to expedite testing by five times, and shorten software delivery cycles by at least 30 percent — with open source playing a pivotal part.

Founded in 2019, Testsigma pitches itself as an open source test automation platform “for modern developer and quality assurance” teams, one devoid of complex setups that works entirely out-of-the-box. Ultimately, it’s all about “simplifying test automation at scale,” Testsigma cofounder and CEO Rukmangada Kandyala told VentureBeat. “Testsigma replaces the complete broken test stack.”

The open source Testsigma platform offers all the company’s core test automation features, including a no-code test design approach that allows anyone to design tests using plain-English scripts, powered by natural language processing (NLP).

A separate Testsigma cloud service ushers several additional features and tools into the mix, including hosting, pre-built integrations, and technical support. Elsewhere, a self-hosted Testsigma edition brings all of these benefits to a company’s own infrastructure.

The open source factor

Proprietary alternatives such as Tricentis have gained solid reputations for what they bring to the test automation sphere, but Testsigma founder and CEO Rukmangada Kandyala argues that such tools are too vendor-dependent, don’t support a great deal of customization, and ultimately “don’t scale for complex setups.”

Other open source projects such as Selenium and Appium, which companies use to build custom testing frameworks, often require too much configuration and “stitching together”, with different technical skillsets often required too.

“Given there are so many use cases, languages and app types, test automation becomes overwhelmingly complex and time-consuming to the point where it becomes its own — or parallel — development project,” Kandyala said. “The platform that we choose, should have the flexibility to add more to it as needed, which is possible only through open source frameworks, but it’s [other existing open source solutions] too complex to set up and scale.”

And that, essentially, is where Testsigma enters the fray — it promises the flexibility, customizability, and extensibility of open source, but with the simplicity of an off-the-shelf solution.

“The current test stack is complex, time-consuming to build, and just doesn’t scale like you would want it to,” Kandyala explained. “We want to change that by standardizing the fragmented test stack, and coalesce it into an easy-to-use platform that combines the flexibility of open source test automation tools but with the ease of existing closed source low-code solutions.”

In its two-plus years in existence, Testsigma has managed to amass a fairly impressive roster of commercial enterprise customers, including Sage, HPE, and Netgear. To take the company to the next level, where it sees itself being used by as many as 25 million developers and QA personnel, Testsigma today announced that it has raised $4.6 million in a seed round of funding led by Accel and Strive, with participation from BoldCap and a slew of angel investors.

Kandyala said that the company plans to use its fresh cash injection to bolster its internal team, and develop a host of new features.

“What we’re trying to do at Testsigma is not just simplify test automation to speed up the testing, but also make it a sustainable, scalable process in which the tools don’t require ongoing maintenance, freeing up the teams to focus on value-delivery instead of building and maintaining scripts and frameworks,” Kandyala said.