Nocode Application Testing – Syed Hamid, Sofy

This is texturing TV. Hey guys. Thanks for the throw.

We're here with Syed Hammond. Who is the CEO for Sophie? 75 million dollars for a no-code testing platform, and we're going to jump into what that means side.

Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Thank you. There is no shortage of testing tools out there maybe a shortage of people using them correctly, but there's plenty of platforms out there. So what exactly does a no code tool do for people versus the types of tools we've seen historically Yeah, I think if you look at before I go into that specific one, if you look at the problem all the 29 million worldwide developers that are having it's actually they have to constantly not only write the code to run the automation but also constantly running it and maintaining it on an excellent on a regular basis people depends up to 30% of their time.

Just testing it. So when we set out to build the no Code test automation platform, we start thinking about not just the automation but also the experience meaning when you are testing it you need to get an environment. You need to create automation.

You need to maintain the Automation and more importantly find issues like visual quality performance and like UI ux and accessibility issues. So that's why we are the no quote platform automation that makes the show. Let's take view of the quote you a experience instead of just focusing.

On the no code itself and that's really what differentiates us from us as an example people spend 30 minutes to an hour or just configure in test environment. You can do it in the 10 seconds in our platform. You have to use so many different specialized tools to get visual quality performance and other aspects of the testing we get you out of the box.

That's why we call it the no-go test automation platform that gives you all those aspects of your testing right out of the box. So what's the plan for the funding? What what work needs to be done still, um during the pin that make we thought significant increase they grew Forex last year.

We are expected to grow 4X this year and next year as well. So our investment is actually scaling the whole business. We are less than 30 employees expected to grow more than double with while everybody is freezing and laying off people.

Actually, we believe it's a great opportunity to really disrupt the the QA test market and then overall deaf productivity Market. Do you think the test themselves are going to be done more by the developers or there still be a testing team that will evaluate the software itself because sometimes you know if I test myself I'm always going to pass right? You're great.

Excellent question. I get this question all the time that you know, where what the future of this almost six million QA Engineers worldwide. So it really varies on the teams and maturity and the agility aspects of it.

For example, the some of our customers who are less than 15 Lloyd. Actually, they don't have a QA dedicity. They want everything to be done.

So but as the maturity of the product increases or if they are in the market for few years, they have to validate more. So as an example, if you are releasing your application in 10 countries, right you can write a one good line of code change that can impact your millions of customer base. So if you go Into the maturity of your application and and the space or the market that you're releasing it to that actually fundamentally decide how you test it and some team actually have dedicated teams and are using our platform and some people are using at the developer s***.

Right? But how I see it in the next five years that it will shift more and more towards the devops. Meaning meaning developers should be unable to go and do testing right when the code is change rather than after the fact and that's what we see.

So to answer your question. It will be more towards the day of than the dedicated testings. How do I integrate your platform with devops workflows?

I mean are there to clis apis? How does that all come about? Yeah.

ai and sign up. It's a product let growth we believe the developers used to feel it be productive before we do anything so they can come to the surface sign up and within a few minutes. They can actually automate their course scenarios and we out of the box provide cicd integration with all pretty much all the devops tools that you can integrate So within few hours, you can automate your top scenarios and a great as part of your daily bills.

Yes, do you think we're going to see a convergence of all these capabilities of different platforms people have been using the test different things is all that starting to become a feature of a larger platform in the cloud versus me having it maintain this rather complex testing environment. Actually, I I do believe that and that's exactly why we build it. So if you look at it today, if you have an engineering manager or a VP of engineering and you have Android team and and iOS team as an example or web team, you literally have more than 10 to 15 different tools that you're dealing with on a daily basis right from Android to app.

Yeah to export dude like your own device farm, right? So you totally right that you know, people have so much tools that they have to use and if you have a find issues like performance and visual quality of your application, you have a game specialized students and that's what exactly we're trying to address is to bring all these on an average 10 to different tools and do a one seamless beautiful experience of Sophie. Do you think AI will play a larger role in testing and what might that look like because some people are a little skeptical.

So what is the state of AI and testing these days? So if you look at it before I talk about the solution, there are three key problems that people are having in in the QA space. Number one is that when a product change comes in ability to identify watch impacted?

Number two is that how do I run? The relevant test cases at scale right on different platforms? And the third is that if any minor product change comes happens, I mean my maintenance increases because you know, if I change an icon from here to this point, it fails so the the identification running and maintainability.

These are the three aspects that are the problematic today. So we see is that if it's right now more than the AI it's the machine learning that's impacting and that we are actually using it as well and how we are using it. We actually use this to identify where the patterns are identify for a given product change where the the impacted code basis or impact it functional test or your performance test runs that automatically and then run at a scale on N number of devices depending on the change you have made and the third is that when the you run the test If you ask any QA Engineers, you'll find the they find a lot of false positives.

So that's where the machine learning and AI comes into the picture that there we can identify here. Where are the failure or false positive so you can actually identify and run it or you can use the other aspect of the application to run the product in our cases where we are using specifically is it's two cases when we are running when we are creating the no code automation. Product changes all the time.

If you're running a on a Samsung S7 versus a tablet, right? The form factors are changed. So this whole Behavior changes and that's where we use to kind of determine where the next test should be run and how we should run it.

So I definitely see in the next three five years that that will come into more and more to play. There's a lot of folks who are talking about security and security testing. Do you think that that becomes part of the QA testing process eventually, I mean, it is part of the quality experience at the end of the day.

Yeah, so there are again. Two type of testing that people usually perform right one is that static analysis, right? You have like companies who are performing a static analysis saying hey if they're any well notability, right, which is actually most of the people actually do it as part of the QA processes.

The problem that you'll come is that when you're doing the runtime analysis, I'll run time testing or a penetration testing which is very specialized one. Right? So, I think that the penetration testing has always been a part of death, but they are companies who are performing that at that security test.

Eventually I see is that that element will be coming into the testing and people are actually building tools to bring that more on the static analysis and identification of it not around the penetration testing as much. So what is the one thing when it comes to testing that you see organizations doing over and over again? It just makes you shake your head and go.

When are we going to figure this out? Hey. You know, it's an interesting thing.

It's it like again it's like they actually everything will be of engineering that I talked to they said man. Why do I need to spend the same test men well and take two three times through two three days to release that. I mean everything that they look the days even in 80s and 90s people were doing majority of manual testing.

Anyway today, you'll find people in the companies what actually spending days three four five days of men will testing running on N number of devices and give the results back. So people say the look. Yeah, they are challenges.

They are stack changing but look we need with a simpler easier solution to go do that. And the reason people cannot do that is it's primary one reason. It's too complex and it requires engineering skills.

If I ask you engineer on engineering manager to create a really great automation for your sweet. They have to dedicate a full time and Junior and you're supposed to do that and they're very short and with sources as you know, the engineering Talent is very difficult to hide and that's where the problem has been that constant man will And the complexity of just so many tools to go and create an Automation and run it on a regular basis. There's a lot of end users that will access a piece of software and wonder who if anybody ever tested this thing at all.

We have a lot of digital business transformation projects that are occurring with a certain amount of shall we say uneven success? Yeah. Is it just that the people building software don't think like everybody else or is there something fundamentally fun?

And the way we think about testing in the first books? And you know, the problem is actually at the end of the time resources and and money right? It's the time that really everything will team especially if you thought and go with that people had to transform and like years of the work in like in months, right?

So people took the rest and there's a look we are going to just get out there and use a/b testing or testing in production to kind of validate it and turn around fast. So there is a philosophy of of some engineering team. I said look release things fast and release it at a smaller subset of your production server learn from it and turn around fast instead of spending days and months or weeks trying to test it everything and then release it.

So that's the fundamental shift and people are actually became easy. Yeah adapting to I said look we are going to release in production and we will find issues and we will turn around fast, which I think is a the fundamental issue because you Not all Industries are same you can deal with certain things. If you're not using with with like a lower business impact data, but you can't do that without hbi or an MBI data set.

All right. Well, I think that end users starting to figure out the developers or have been experimenting on them and calling an agile programming and they're not all that happy about it says being on the show. Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. All right back to you guys in the studio, and thank you.