Crowdsourced testing solutions company Applause App Quality Inc. today announced the launch of the world’s first Integrated Functional Testing platform that bridges manual and automated testing to help brands accelerate development and improve quality of digital experiences for customers.

Applause believes that it’s the first and only testing service to offer this coordinated solution, which is available to all customers using a holistic dashboard view.

“Integrated Functional Testing is a first for the testing industry, in that it is a holistic solution for both manual and automated testing,” said Doron Reuveni, founder and chief executive of Applause. “Unlike automation tools that are built for a singular purpose, Integrated Functional Testing gives brands insight and visibility into the complete range of testing methods, workflows and results.”

When it comes to releasing a quality product, many industries use both manual and automated testing in order to discover flaws before they become issues for customers. Both of these strategies are essential to any standard testing strategy. A problem arises, however, in that manual and automated testing often run within separate workflows.

This workflow separation leads to redundancy and difficulty in maximizing test coverage. To resolve that issue, Integrated Functional Testing combines a real-world, crowdsourced approach for manual testing with an automation framework that integrates seamlessly into continuous delivery and integration pipelines for DevOps teams thus increasing efficiency and permitting greater visibility into processes.

“This holistic approach to testing and quality saves time by eliminating the burdens of working across multiple systems and saves money by quickly and fully evaluating the risk of each release,” Reuveni said. “These are benefits typical automation tools cannot offer.”

The reason that manual and automated testing solutions become separate is that they are often siloed within an organization. This leads to fragmented reporting, which leads teams to spend additional time comparing notes to bring themselves together to create a unified vision of the testing process.

With Applause Integrated Functional Testing all reporting goes to one place and clients can understand the process from a top-down view. As a result, the heath of each product, feature or function can be discerned across both processes at any point in time without the need to integrate them.

The automated testing market reached an estimated $12.6 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach $28.8 billion by 2024, according to a report from MarketsAndMarkets. This industry services small, medium-sized and enterprise businesses that produce hardware and software across numerous uses. Mobile devices, especially smartphone apps, make up a huge portion of that market and they connect businesses to customers like never before.

Updates to these apps have continued to accelerate as well. The need to stay on top of the latest needs for customers and update information to provide the best possible experience continues to drive the DevOps revolution and testing is essential in providing that quality.

In a real-world use case, Priceline, an online travel agency, has implemented IFT for better integration of its own manual and automated testing solutions.

“Since we are constantly making improvements to that experience and our underlying systems, having an effective quality assurance program is essential,” said Eric Goldberg, vice president of quality assurance at Priceline. “The new Applause integrated functional testing approach helps us accomplish this in an efficient and scalable manner.”

Image: Applause