Rainforest QA Inc. announced today the launch of a no-code test automation solution with its free-forever plan designed to make testing accessible to any employee regardless of technical skill.

Rainforest is best known for creating a platform that crowdsources a community of human testers from around the world to test software at scale. Testers follow English instructions and provide direct but insightful feedback based on manual visual testing.

In addition to human testers, the company has now added a proprietary no-code test automation service to the platform that uses virtual devices and includes a visual test editor. With the editor, anyone can create, update and execute complex, automated test cases without any programming background needed.

“This launch marks a major milestone in our mission to make quality assurance accessible to everyone responsible for product quality and user experience,” said Fred Stevens-Smith, chief executive of Rainforest. “And it reflects the fact that modern QA means optimizing not only for quality but also for speed of execution.”

To make it even more accessible, the automated testing solution service is free to use up to five hours every month with Rainforest’s free Essentials plan.

Within the plan, the only thing that counts toward the five monthly hours is the time spent testing on the automation service. Any time spent building tests, the number of test cases generated, creating and maintaining tests, reviewing and tagging results are all unlimited.

What makes the no-code automation so powerful is the visual editor. With the editor, it’s possible to direct the service to the part of the app that will be tested, select an action and then proceed through the workflow. That’s done by highlighting the target of the action with the mouse and selecting what needs to be interacted with. Everything is designed to be human-readable.

Of course, the test automation solution doesn’t replace the human tester community, which can still be deployed at any time from within Rainforest’s service. However, human testers are only available through paid plans.

Automated testing is great for labor-intensive, manual quality assurance processes such as filling in text fields, pressing buttons and other rote types of testing each time the app changes. However, human testing can help detect more subjective issues such as images that are slightly blurry, elements of the interface that testers had trouble interacting with and similar issues.

A report from ReportLinker revealed that the global market for software testing in 2020 was $45.6 billion and is projected to reach $109.5 billion by 2027. Whereas Statista estimates about a quarter of enterprise information technology budgets are allocated to QA and testing.

Quality assurance and testing are integral to releasing bug-free software, but they can also be costly. Rainforest’s vision is to provide both savings and flexibility to choose between automated tests and human experts to give the best of both worlds.

Image: Rainforest