Arto Vuori and Eero Heino “wanted to make the world’s best software testing automation service available to all teams.” Thus they founded Usetrace, a web testing automation service that requires no programming to build a highly maintainable test automation suite. “The adoption time has been reduced to minutes, letting our customers skip the need to build and maintain a custom testing automation infrastructure in-house.” says Arto.
The journey
“In 2004 our team built an online gaming marketplace for Counter-Strike where server providers were connected to the players.” Arto recalls. The platform was quite an advanced one back then and it got a 70 % market share in Finland. Players were buying online game time using SMS payments and this platform started and configured the server automatically in one minute. The team was relying on “then-fresh agile software development methodologies like eXtreme Programming heavily and managed to release the first version that got paying customers from scratch in merely 3 months.” This is how the software testing automation lessons were learnt. Later, while “working on a number of projects in startups and enterprises like Nokia”, these lessons came handy.
“We reconnected in 2011 and founded our current startup Usetrace.” Arto tells us. He adds, “We had built heavy test automation infrastructures in numerous projects and wanted to make the world’s best software testing automation service available to all teams.”
Know more about Usetrace…
With the evolution of Agile software development, instead of long release cycles, software is nowadays released on a daily basis. This compels the functional regression testing to be done automatically. “Usetrace lets you automate testing of your critical functionalities extremely quickly. It’s better than the existing non-programmable testing tools because it lets you build maintainable test suites, acknowledging the fact that your web site is continuously under change. Not only is the making of tests quick, but changing them is too.” says Arto.
Usetrace’s automated tests are called traces – visual cartoon-like descriptions of the end-users using your web site. Once the traces have been made, Usetrace will run them whenever your code changes and reports if regressions occur. Traces can be used not only “to test the staging environment before shipping for production, but also to continuously monitor the production from the user’s perspective or even drive a 10K load of real browsers to your site to check for performance issues.”
On the challenges, user-base and monetization…
Defining the right MVP, small enough to validate the idea, sophisticated enough to be of value was the biggest challenge. Also, a lot companies aren’t very much bothered about testing. There the challenge is to convince them that better software testing can save them a lot of time and money. “Outsourced manual software testing services are attractive because currently, testing automation solutions require special skills not available to many companies, and the core team wishes to focus on making new features instead of doing repetitive testing.The technically advanced companies use scriptable tools like Selenium to build in-house testing automation solutions.” Arto tells us. He adds, “Software testing automation is one of the areas that clearly benefits from the scale of the cloud. Our plan is to be the number of software testing automation company in the world.”
Having validated the product in Finland with paying customers, in the next phase, Usetrace aims to improve the service and grow its global user base. The user base is composed of Web developers and Testers.
“Our pricing is based on the usage of the service.” Arto tells us. “The automated test runs are billed $0.10/min. A typical small software company pays us $100-500 monthly. A large company may have multiple Usetrace project accounts and pay us $1000s monthly.”
Usetrace offers 50% off for the first two months to its new subscribers.
Please visit https://usetrace.com/ for more information.
