Accelq Inc., a platform for codeless app delivery automation, announced Tuesday the introduction of Accelq Live, which will bring cloud-native continuous integration and testing to low-code and no-code application development pipelines.

As businesses continue to increase their reliance on low-code and no-code technology stacks such as Salesforce, ServiceNow and Workday, it has become more difficult to provide sufficient test automation, Accelq founder and Chief Executive Mahendra Alladi told SiliconANGLE in an interview.

“Traditional test automation is way too complicated even for conventional software environments,” Alladi said. “There is a need to simplify and speed up the testing phase, and build a capability to quickly validate changes.”

With the launch of Accelq Live, business users will be able to build no-code apps using their favored cloud-native platforms, and the platform will reduce testing complexity by automatically updating itself as these platforms are updated. That takes the burden off development teams to keep up with codeless app platforms when they update to make sure that patches don’t break testing.

Users will also gain access to pre-built codeless automation test assets modeled after business processes that are designed to work in multicloud environments. That makes it even easier for business users to build their own no-code apps and then modify tests to fit them using Live.

No-code and low-code apps development platforms have grown significantly over the past few years, reaching a global market revenue of $13 billion in 2020, according to Statista, and the market is predicted to reach $65 billion by 2027. The trend is believed to largely be driven by how these tools enable anyone, regardless of technical expertise, to engage in app development, which includes design, implementation and deployment.

Although low-code and no-code app development frameworks have proliferated, Alladi explained that low-code testing automation has lagged behind. That has created a skills gap and greatly slows down development velocity when it comes to preparing tests and assuring the quality of code as it goes live. It also means that test automation has become a “specialist function” that takes developer time away from other things, such as building more functionality into a platform.

“Test automation has traditionally been a programming intensive exercise,” Alladi said. “And you need advanced level programming skills to automate the complex interactions that modern cloud apps bring. Adding to that, constant changes and upgrades that the enterprise cloud-apps introduce will mean that the test scripts need heavy maintenance.”

Alladi said reducing the complexity of testing automation by providing hundreds of pre-defined, modular components will help abstract away most of what prevents users from gaining momentum. To make it even more accessible, test assets are managed in plain English, using business process language.

“This problem did not just need another tool for codeless automation testing,” Alladi said. “It needed a principally different approach that takes the best of both worlds of automation being codeless but at the same time built on a design-first approach where the outcome is sustainable and robust.”

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