reflow.io

I've been getting positive feedback on the tool from those I show it to, but I don't think the story was clear from the reflow homepage.

Building a good homepage seems like a dark art to me. When I try to critically review my own homepage, the copy seems pretty amateurish, and exactly what the tool is and why it's useful is unclear. Unfortunately, being able to see this is still a few steps away from fixing it.

Hence I've iterated, spent far too long putting together a demo video, and added explicit user stories that try to demonstrate why the tool is useful to different target audiences.

I'm definitely out of my depth trying to market this with my engineering-focused skill set, so for my sanity I've been going in waves; doing a bit of marketting effort followed by building a few features to relax. This time I implement drag/drop support and visual assertions: features that are very difficult to built into a custom test suite when using a code-based tool like selenium or cypress.

If anyone reading this has actionable feedback on the homepage at https://reflow.io ; would love to hear it!

From a business point of view, it's a terrible thing to just start coding on an idea only relying on gut instinct. From a personal point of view, it's incredibly relaxing to just pick a target product and start making it real.

I started building reflow.io as something different; automated unit test code generation. The idea was that by running code in a tightly controlled execution environment, you gain enough information to automatically write unit tests for that code.

Whilst building this was very cathartic, the interface to creating those tests was unpalatable. It was a slow, automated program that turned on/off breakpoints, gathering execution data and source maps. Once complete, it outputted a series of passing unit tests that mocked, passed in, and validated execution data as it was when the program was run. After being a little disheartened by this, I started working on reflow as the product-before-the-product.

Reflow is now something I'm proud of: it's a no-code UI record/replay test automation tool with visual regression support. It can be run entirely on-premise, allowing a development team to easily create and maintain resilient end-to-end tests against a locally (or behind a firewall) running web server. It is also available online with no dependencies, allowing anyone in an organization to contribute to the testing process too.

I've opened it up to public registrations with the hope it will help someone out.

https://reflow.io/blog/1.html