No-code automated UI tests
I've always been reluctant to share my ideas on here, because I was afraid that someone would steal my idea if it was good!
But, I'm passed that. The value of feedback is too good - posting on here has already saved me from countless hours of wasted time building products that no one would have wanted. So thank you already fellow IHers!
The idea: No-code Automated UI testing service
Imagine a web browser extension that you use to record actions on websites, and then these actions get translated into code which is run automatically every X days or weeks to make sure the actions are still executable, with the expected results.
You would have a video of the test (the actions that you performed). And, you would get notifications when the tests failed on your site. (I never again want to be the last one to find out that my sign-up form broke, for example.)
You painlessly set up the test, and we execute it at constant intervals. No more wondering, no more stress about "What if X isn't working correctly...?"
Pain-points to alleviate
- UI testing is inherently fragile - make yours more resilient
- UI testing is tedious to write - create it by clicking on your live page, no by coding
- UI testing is hard to understand - code can look messy, instead you have a video of what is being tested
- UI is undervalued - a broken form or a broken link can be extremely costly, especially if you don't know about it for a long time
I'd appreciate the IH community feedback! Especially you developers (front-end or fullstack).
It'd be fun to create a waitlist and build in public if there is enough interest.
Hey Jake! this is a great idea and if you are passionate about UI testing you should absolutely build your vision of this. I've worked in the testing space for few years and theres a lot of competition out there trying to perfect what you're describing. Check out Rainforest QA to see one version of this.
Andrew thanks for the reference - I hadn't seen Rainforest QA but they are doing great work. I see they have ~$42 million in funding so it is highly doubtful that I could build something by myself that outperforms them.
I do wonder though that if this space is new enough, there might be a niche for me to carve out in the market. Regardless, thanks for pointing me to this - a lot to learn here.
Rainforest QA is pretty good, indeed. Does your team use it?
RainforestQA found there were 3 market segments they could go after: QA companies, the enterprises that buy the services of QA companies, and development teams that do their own testing. They built a tool that can be used by segments 1 and 3, but most of the money was spent by large enterprises, so they wanted to compete for that business by hiring their own QA testers via Mechanical Turk, which took QA companies out of their customer pool. I don't know if small dev teams would use a visual testing product. It'd be a hard sell for me personally because of the price and the lock-in factor.
If you can build a no-code visual testing product that is open source solution, you could compete for the business of QA companies and small dev teams.
Good point @DracoThundery - for me, being realistic about my constraints and being an aspiring solo-preneur, it would be hard (or impossible?) for me to compete with Rainforest for the business of the 3 segments you described.
You think small dev teams wouldn't pay for such a service? I would hope that small dev teams or small agencies would be willing to pay for a super simple service that ensures their UI flows are always working. They could sleep peacefully at night :)
If such a niche exists, I'd go for it. Just need to validate the segment/market here.
Two major issues: 1) lock-in and 2) tests are UI-only. RainforestQA is closed source and if your team spends a lot of time to write your tests on their platform, they will lock you in as a customer, and charge whatever they want because you can't just walk away from them. Second, the tests are UI only. I'd like to be able to export my tests to Cypress, Puppeteer or Webdriver code, and modify them if I want to.
Where can I buy it? If you do that, I'm your customer.
Nice Matteo! I'd like to do my due diligence first and do a bit more validating. Perhaps we could set up a short chat so I can learn more about your use-case? Can't find your email on here. But shoot me an email!
With pleasure we can exchange, you can contact me by email at [email protected]
@DracoThundery @MLF I just discovered Selenium IDE which may be of interest to you both. It is basically a low-code UI test generator. And you can export the test into code: Python, C++, Ruby, and more.
Now if these tests could be exported to a web service that automatically runs the test, might be on to somethings
I think I've seen that before. Two major issues with it are 1) it's targeted at a trained QA engineer persona 2) it can only export to a handful of test frameworks. The first issue is a limiting factor to scaling your QA team, which is an important consideration to enterprise customers, and second one is problematic for developer teams who use trendy frameworks like Puppeteer or Cypress.