All software must undergo software quality assurance testing, typically by human testers who write a set of test cases to check the software interface for bugs and other problems.
On Tuesday, Raleigh, North Carolina startup MuukTest unveiled a new AI agent designed to help build these tests in a more automated way.
“Since our founding, we had a vision to automate software QA techniques and reduce test creation to one click, and that's always been our vision,” Ivan Barajas Vargas, co-founder and CEO of the company, told TechCrunch.
These tools allow testers to test every menu, button, and action in a software user interface under multiple conditions, uncovering as many bugs as possible before the software is released to the public.
CTO and co-founder Renan Ugalde says Barajas Vargas has worked in software quality assurance testing for 20 years, so the company wanted to leverage Ugalde's engineering capabilities to capture that deep understanding and train an AI agent that would help build test suites.
They applied that knowledge by combining a number of AI techniques, including multiple large-scale language models, traditional machine learning, computer vision, and image recognition. “We thought of our AI agents like QA testers, and we trained them to understand the context within the application: what are the menus, what are the inputs, and when you expect something to appear,” Ugalde says.
This requires reinforcement learning, plus detailed information about the overall context and all of the QA experience of the two founders to translate that into an agent.
Over time, “AI agent” has emerged as a term to describe AI-powered software that assists with a task or set of tasks, but there is currently no standard definition. In MuukTest's case, the AI agent acts as an intelligent assistant, performing some of the more mundane tasks traditionally performed by human QA testers.
The founders immigrated to the US from Mexico in 2011. Barajas-Vargas eventually ended up at Dell and Ugalde at IBM, where both progressed in their careers with increasing levels of responsibility. They joined forces to launch MuukTest in 2019. The goal has always been to reduce the effort required to generate and execute QA tests.
“While early versions of the company's solution used no-code and algorithms to create tests, with its new generative AI product, customers simply describe the type of test suite they want and MuukTest creates it automatically. They can then run the AI-created set of tests with a single click, significantly reducing the effort required,” he said.
MuukTest began finding product-market fit early last year. Even before the AI element was added to its product set, the company was performing well, achieving 15x year-over-year revenue growth last year, and believes it is poised for even more rapid growth with the new capabilities.
The company joined MassChallenge, a Massachusetts-based startup incubator, in the year it launched and has raised a total of $6 million in investments and grants. The company, which has 36 employees and 10 contractors, plans to remain conservative with its spending, Barajas-Vargas said.
The new AI agents feature is generally available starting today.