Hey all, Josh here, Co-founder and CEO at Cycle Labs (https://cyclelabs.io/). In 2007, I was on site at the original iPhone launch at the only distribution center in the nation that was slated to ship the first iPhone. I spent a decade working on the systems powering this facility (their execution systems Warehouse Management Systems). Since that date in 2007 we were only able to install 3 major system upgrades into that production facility because of the difficulty of it. That's a scarily slow technology adoption velocity but very common in the enterprise space - particularly the supply chain space as these systems are incredibly complex and often drive physical processes such as conveyors, robotics, and orchestrate the movement of humans and inventory throughout a warehouse. These complexities combined with no automated testing solutions meant the cutover to production was always miserable and riddled with issues.

These experiences made me realize that there is a secondary deployment cycle that goes largely untested because of a lack of appropriate tooling. In the primary software deployment lifecycle, testing stops when the software is deployed to production. However, today there is a secondary lifecycle where software is integrated with other solutions and even modified and extended for a particular organization by the end users or an implementation team. This secondary lifecycle falls prey to the same pitfalls of primary software development such as missed requirements, misunderstandings and miscommunications. This unique context requires different tooling and different expertise. Cycle (that's the name of our system) is test automation targeted at deployment/implementation teams and not development teams.

Generally speaking, the teams responsible for integrating and deploying these packaged solutions into their production systems aren’t developers in the traditional sense; so the testing solution needs to be less technical but also approachable by business users. Furthermore, the business processes powered by these solutions often span multiple technologies, applications and teams so there needs to be a single platform to manage tests that will not require specific expertise on the many different underlying technologies. The tests need to exist at the highest level, testing the way the system is used -- not how it’s built.

The initial version of Cycle, which we built in 2014, is a continuous testing platform targeted at the enterprise deployment space and delivered as an on-premise solution. It works across web, native, java, api, database and OS interactions.

To make Cycle more available, we've launched a cloud-native version of (https://app.cyclelabs.io/signup) which is free for use. We've attempted to be iterative in our approach and so this MVP is web-only for right now. After signup, you can write behavior-focused tests for any public facing web application. Admittedly it's rough around the edges but we'd like to get feedback in realtime and iterate.

If you want to give it a try, you can access the application here (https://app.cyclelabs.io/signup), and review the getting started guide here (https://my.cycleautomation.com/user-manual/cycle-cloud-manua...). We have an example project (https://github.com/CycleLabsCloud/cycle-cloud) if you just want to quickly see how tests execute and get a feel for what the application is like and how it works.