Autonomous E2E Application Testing Disruptor ProdPerfect Announces $13M Series A Led by Anthos Capital 

Strong momentum for ProdPerfect’s E2E testing platform based on data-driven, machine-led analysis of anonymous live user traffic

San Francisco, CA, Dec. 17, 2019 — ProdPerfect, the emerging leader in autonomous end-to-end (E2E) web application testing, today announced its $13 million Series A round led by Anthos Capital with the participation of Fika Ventures, Eniac Ventures, Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, and Acrew Capital. Unleashing the power of machine learning to solve the hardest, most important, and previously unsolved problems in E2E QA testing, ProdPerfect autonomously and continuously identifies, creates, maintains, and evolves E2E test suites via analysis of live user traffic. Building on its $2.6 million seed round announced in March 2019, the company has over 50 customers and has been growing 25 percent month over month in booked revenue. The new funding will enable ProdPerfect to further maximize its impact on application quality, deployment speed, and developer productivity for technology leaders. 

“ProdPerfect matches our investment profile to support high impact, mission-driven teams building disruptive companies in spaces ripe for transformation,” shared Paul Farr of Anthos Capital. “Their data-driven approach removes the guesswork and critical coverage problems in application testing by automatically discovering and testing based on live user traffic – freeing up valuable engineering resources for digital product innovation.”

“We are thrilled to have the support and recognition of Anthos Capital for our mission to fight burnout in software engineers by automating pains out of software development and improving developer impact,” said Dan Widing, Founder and CEO of ProdPerfect. “And we are excited to have the vote of confidence for our radical approach to quality assurance by our growing customer base, consisting of Silicon Valley hypergrowth startups to established global brands.”

As late as 2019, even sophisticated businesses struggle with testing. According to recent research conducted by large industry players and research firms, 44% of software companies are still testing mostly or entirely manually; only 28% have become mostly or fully automated. Additionally, one third of testing teams are still using spreadsheets for test management. Only 17% have fully embraced DevOps, and only 21% are able to fix bugs immediately. The bugs that are not caught by testing cost the globe literally trillions per year. This is true despite the fact that 25% of software budgets are allocated towards testing for QA. Decades of work to build partial solutions to the global QA problem have not met the needs of engineering teams.

ProdPerfect sets itself apart from the myriad of “automated” testing solutions by deploying a fully-managed, hands-off E2E autonomous browser-level regression test suite based on anonymous live user data, which requires no training, maintenance, or mindshare. 

“There’s nothing else available that can do what ProdPerfect does. No other test automation product will help you determine what tests to write, and none of them are hands-off like ProdPerfect,” shares Tom Jaklitsch, CTO of Negotiatus, a leading purchasing software solution and an early ProdPerfect customer. “ProdPerfect identified 5-6 potentially site-breaking bugs in test, but the service was entirely worth it as soon as we found one. It’s an integral part of our testing and deployment pipelines, and knowing that our integration tests are constantly up-to-date and protecting our core workflows has empowered our engineering and product teams to deliver more efficiently.”

About ProdPerfect

ProdPerfect is the first autonomous, end-to-end (E2E), regression testing solution that continuously identifies, creates, maintains, and evolves E2E test suites via data-driven, machine-led analysis of live user traffic. It is the only fully-managed solution that addresses critical test coverage gaps, eliminates long test suite runtimes and costly bugs in production, and removes the QA burden that consumes massive engineering resources.

For more information, please visit https://prodperfect.com/

ProdPerfect Removes the Burden of QA Testing

There are typically three levels of quality assurance testing maturity. One is the classic waterfall approach where it takes weeks to get a deploy ready. Then, there is the continuous development and continuous delivery approach where QA engineers are put in place to handle automation. The most mature way of tackling QA is removing QA engineering as a separate practice, and making all your engineers responsible for the quality of features.

The problem is that none of these levels of maturity seem to be able to get QA right.

“No one has a good answer. Enterprise are failing in waterfall structures. Agile teams are failing or running into difficulty hiring and maintaining QA engineers. Silicon Valley is having to hire only the most senior folks, and even then it is through force of will and pain they are able to keep test suites to a point they are happy with,” said Dan Widing, founder and CEO of the automated QA testing provider ProdPerfect.

Automating QA
There is a better way. ProdPerfect removes the struggle it takes to set up a QA engineering department, and automates QA testing using live user data. This is “dramatically cheaper, dramatically faster, gets you a result faster, [and] is going to nearly guarantee that you catch bugs as part of your process,” Widing explained.

ProdPerfect is able to obtain live user data by analyzing web traffic and creating flows of common user behavior. That behavior is then built into an end-to-end testing suite that ProdPerfect maintains, expands and updates based on actual user data over time.

According to Widing, QA testing is “incredibly difficult, painstaking work that almost tends to be underappreciated by the organization itself,” and the folks who are having to deal with this are just overburdened with work. “We have a mechanism that lets us shake out the environment the customer needs us to test against… and then we are using a testing framework that lets us plug in our learnings from these steps to produce an automatically updated test suite,” he continued. “The experience the customer gets is a black box QA engineering department… What you get at the end is an auto-updated test suite that can run continuously in your CI system that just tests your application.”

ProdPerfect covers every core workflow with applications, provides 95 percent or more of test stability, less than four-hour regeneration of broken tests, and less than 48-hour test coverage for new feature sets.

“You don’t need to do anything to build, maintain, or expand the testing suite. We got it. You need to respond to bug reports, of course, and keep a stable testing environment up and running for us, but that’s all. Very frequently people call this ‘magic’ or ‘too good to be true,’” the company stated on its website.

Getting the right metrics
ProdPerfect not only works to ensure QA testing is covered, but also works to help teams understand what the right metrics to quantify success are.

“That is something we put into our service every step of the way. What your browser automation should be doing is catching as many significant bugs as possible whatever stage it is testing at and then otherwise staying as much out of the way,” said Widing.

You will know you have a solid testing foundation in place when you don’t ship a fire drill-style bug and have to wake up in the middle of the night and figure out how to deal with it or who is on top of it, Widing explained.

Since ProdPerfect is already analyzing what users are doing, it can project how things should be working and make sure they stay working. The solution tests features continuously, detects any significant bugs and verifies the feature set is actually working.

“We aim to stay out of the way by crafting what are the other metrics that are important to make sure you are not slowing down the software team,” said Widing.

Additionally, the solution will measure against minimum-frequency thresholds to confirm its performance.

“If you don’t set up your design and data strategy or set up the right tooling, everything falls apart and you have to work particularly hard to make sure all the pieces work together otherwise any singular improvement is not going to help you at all,” Widing said.

This article was first published on SDTimes.com.

What’s New at ProdPerfect?

Supporting Pre-Stage Environments

ProdPerfect is now running in Heroku Review Apps and other ephemeral environments! Our platform now supports targeting pre-staging environments that are spun up by your team to test feature branches during the pull request. This marks a huge step for us better supporting Continuous Testing.

Requesting Skipped Tests

In our test result Web Portal, you can also now request a test to be skipped. This is a great option for when your team pushes a UI change without a regression, to get a failing test offline and into the update queue. This will keep the test from blocking the next build. 

How ProdPerfect is Changing the Game for Clients

“It makes sense.  Our regression tests should cover what our users are doing.”  -Thorsten Hemann, CTO, Optilyz

“The ROI on ProdPerfect is really obvious…less mindshare for me and my leadership team.” -John Rodley, VP of Engineering, Elemental Machines

“Now I’m confident enough that I just updated 75 [Ruby] Gems at once, which was unimaginable before.“ -Forrest Blount, CTO, Bridge US 

“Knowing that our integration tests are constantly up-to-date and protecting our core workflows has empowered our engineering and product teams to deliver more efficiently.” -Tom Jaklitsch, CTO, Negotiatus

ProdPerfect Featured in Tech Crunch for $2.6 Million Seed Round Raise

“ProdPerfect started when co-founder and CEO Dan Widing was VP of engineering at WeSpire, where he saw firsthand the pain points associated with web application QA testing. Whereas there were all kinds of product analytics tools for product engineers, the same data wasn’t there for the engineers building QA tests that are meant to replicate user behavior.

He imagined a platform that would use live data around real user behavior to formulate these QA tests. That’s how ProdPerfect was born. The platform sees user behavior, builds and delivers test scripts to the engineering team.”

Read the full Tech Crunch article here.