Testsigma raises $4.6M from Accel and STRIVE to simplify test automation
Tags: testing, automation, opensource, testautomation
Published: 2022-03-02 05:52:22

I’m happy to announce our financing of $4.6M  led by Accel and STRIVE, with participation from BoldCap and a host of well known entrepreneurs and operators 🎉

These include Shanmugam Krishnasamy, co-founder and CTO of Freshworks; Kiran Darisi, co-founder and VP of engineering at Freshworks; Parsuram Vijayasankar, co-founder and principal engineer at Freshworks; Vetri Vellore, CEO of Ally.io; Nitesh Banta, CEO at B12; Ioann Fainsilber, Co-Founder at Pintek, among others.

I’m grateful to the entire Testsigma team, our users, partners as we celebrate this huge milestone! And, I would like to welcome our investors to this exciting journey!

With an increasing focus on automation and DevOps, software delivery is faster than ever before! Automated testing is essential for balancing software quality with the accelerated velocity of release cycles, but because the toolchain that is supposed to enable automated testing has many moving parts, test automation becomes a parallel development project in organizations. Plus they have huge upfront and ongoing resource, tech, and expertise costs. 

Today’s test stacks have made test automation more about writing and maintaining scripts than about taking quality software to market as quickly as possible.

What we’re trying to do at **[Testsigma](https://testsigma.com/)** is not just simplify test automation to speed up the testing, but also make it a sustainable, scalable process in which the tools and frameworks don’t require ongoing maintenance, freeing up the teams to focus on value delivery instead of building and maintaining scripts and frameworks.

Thousands of developers, QAs, product managers across the world at teams like Sage, HPE, Netgear, HDFC Life, IEEE,  SignEasy, American Psychological Association, Mehiläinen, and more use Testsigma to test continuously throughout their software delivery cycles. 

Since our beta launch we have run 1.5M+ tests for hundreds of products, and on boarded 1000+ users, we are now we have got all the power to accelerate our growth.

We will use the capital to strengthen the core engineering and product team and to build alongside and for a global community of testers, test automation engineers, and developers.

I would like to take this opportunity to share with you our next steps, what we will be focusing on, our road map, and how we are thinning and shaping this platform. 

Our focus areas:

i. Bringing standardization to a fragmented testing toolchain
ii.Enabling faster, more scalable test automation
iii.Improving stability and reliability of automated tests 
iv. Leverage AI to build an autonomous testing platform 
v. Extend to solve for complex test automation requirements
vi. Enabling everyone in modern teams to test for faster releases
vii. Grow our community and build Testsigma as an open source project

##The current test stack is broken & needs a fresh approach

Our founding team has been part of multiple product teams for various organizations, with each one of us being part of product teams for around 15 years. We have seen test automation problems first hand many times and helped the teams build scalable test automation processes.

In that time we’ve primarily seen two types of test automation approaches implemented, both being imperfect:

**1. Custom built frameworks**

Most teams prefer building a custom test stack/framework because of the flexibility but there are significant drawbacks:

i. We realized that the modern test stack is fragmented. It has too many moving parts to be easy to set up and scale.

ii. Given there are so many use cases, languages and app types, test automation becomes overwhelmingly complex & time consuming to the point where it becomes its own development project.

**2. Scriptless tools powered by AI**

Modern tools are simple to begin with but don’t scale for complex setups and constantly evolving applications.

It became clear to us that simple, no-code, AI powered solutions are vendor dependent in terms of flexibility required for scale, whereas custom built solutions require intensive complex dev and integration efforts to both build and maintain over time. As a consequence, [almost two-thirds of all teams](https://www.capgemini.com/in-en/research/world-quality-report-wqr-20-21/) that automate their testing never see a return on their investment.

In a nutshell, the current test stack is complex, time consuming to build, and just doesn’t scale like you would want it to.

We want to change that by standardizing the fragmented test stack and coalescing 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.

##Bringing standardization to a fragmented testing toolchain

We now know the problem lies with the lack of a common standard in the testing ecosystem. So how do we stop test automation from becoming a complex parallel development project?  When we set out to build Testsigma we laid out 3 core principles the platform should achieve:

i. Unify a broken test stack
ii. Simplify the complete testing cycle, from test planning to design, all the way to development, execution, and analysis
iii. Make quality a shared responsibility by enabling non-programmers in the team to test

What we’re trying to do is not just simplify test automation but bring sustainable scalability that can help users and teams actually do more testing rather than being caught up with building and maintaining scripts and frameworks.

##Building a unified testing ecosystem

To really solve for the broken test stack, we had to make sure our platform doesn’t limit users to specific use cases, programming languages, application types etc. 

We decided to bring everything under one roof and built Testsigma as an open-source, low code platform that mimics what the modern Test automation workflow looks like.

Our platform works out-of-the-box. You don’t have to ‘set it up’ one framework, library, and tool at a time. You can simply install it and directly start automating tests for web apps, mobile apps, and APIs. This enables teams to shift focus towards scaling testing rather than maintaining the automation framework to support it.

From test development to reporting, users can perform integrated end-to-end testing that’s supplemented by powerful TestOps, built-in test data management and one-click integrations with delivery pipelines, for web apps, Android and iOS apps, and APIs, etc.

Read more about Testsigma [here](https://testsigma.com/).

##Effortless extensibility

We have seen that after teams automate a number of ‘standard’ tests, they struggle to scale because test scenarios increase in number and complexity while release cycles shortened. It’s no secret that test automation requirements are unique to every organization and constantly change  based on the product & what stage it is at. Test automation requirements can start out small and then grow rapidly.

We wanted to make scalability and extensibility something that was accessible and easy.

Testsigma’s platform approach will enable everyone to easily add custom actions, data generators, reports, integrations etc. form a community powered marketplace and build all these as needed using a simple Testsigma SDK. 

Also, we are an open source platform, you can dig deep and extend the core platform as you need.

##No-code testing that’s not just record and playback

In cross-functional development teams, [everyone including Devs, QAs, PMs are responsible](https://testsigma.com/blog/test-automation-by-smes-qa-analysts-for-continuous-delivery-and-devops/) for the quality of releases. To balance quality with release velocity, we see teams adopting [shift-left continuous testing](https://testsigma.com/blog/how-continuous-testing-supercharges-your-automation-testing/).

We built Testsigma as a platform that everyone in the team could use to plan, develop, execute, and analyze tests, but the traditional ‘record-and-playback’ approach to to test development left a lot of room for flakiness and browser compatibility issues to creep in.

To create tests in Testsigma all you need to know is simple English. You can either write tests step by step, or generate them by recording real-time user scenarios and interactions that are auto-converted into editable tests. 

##Why Open Source?

Our objective is to collaboratively build a future-ready test automation platform, an ‘operating system for software quality’ alongside its most important stakeholders – the user, that decisively bridges the gap between development and testing.

In our journey so far, we’ve noticed that there is a misalignment across quality, teams and tools. There isn’t a tool in the market that involves every quality stakeholder, technical or not, in the building and integration of a test automation framework within the SDLC. We think that by open sourcing our platform, we can bring SDETs, Test Engineers, and Test Automation architects on the same page as QAs, PMs, and SMEs.

Check out [Testsigma GitHub repo](https://github.com/testsigmahq/testsigma)!

We open sourced Testsigma to achieve a few goals:

i. With access to our source code, teams can dig into, customize and extend Testsigma as needed
ii. Makes it easy to integrate existing open-source technology stacks. This flexibility is often missing in closed-source testing tools
iii. Open-source is low risk because it doesn’t involve security constraints 3rd party cloud-based tools are restricted by
iv. We are aware of the immense complexity in test automation, and that every challenge cannot be solved by one team. Open source is a powerful enabler where the entire dev & testing community can collaborate towards the singular goal of simplifying test automation for everyone

We will of course continue to invest time and resources into improving both the open source and cloud version of our product but it’s the contribution of the community that will make Testsigma the universal standard in test automation.

Thank you! 🙏