In the world of app development, quality assurance is essential but often a resource-draining endeavor. According to Statista, 23% of companies' annual IT budgets are allocated to in-house or third-party QA and testing. The risks are high: A survey by QA software testing company QualiTest Group found that 88% of app users would not use an app that had bugs or glitches.
Jon Perl, Laura Cressman, and Scott Wilson, three software developers and marketers, came up with the idea to create QA Wolf, a platform that would make QA for mobile and web apps easier by automating the aspects of test creation and execution.
There are a ton of solutions out there for automating QA testing, and as Julie Bort wrote about code testing startup Nova AI on TechCrunch, it seems like a new one is featured almost every week. So what makes QA Wolf different?
First, QA Wolf pivoted. When the company launched in 2019, it offered only a QA test orchestration tool. That tool worked well, at least as Perl described it, but customers told them they weren't getting the level of test coverage they needed, he says.
“We realized that feature work was always taking priority over test automation,” says Pearl, “so we decided to transform our business and launch a new category that we called 'outcome-based test coverage.'”
This “outcome-based” approach encourages engineers to prioritize value-add features over internal test suites (a common pitfall with QA platforms), Perl says. Some QA platforms, even semi-automated ones, require large teams, infrastructure, and even armies of consultants to maintain. That's not the case with QA Wolf.
“After partnering with QA Wolf, our customers have shipped 2-5x more frequently and have also reduced the amount of rework by allowing teams to 'shift left' testing earlier in the development cycle,” says Perl. “By investing in QA Wolf, management is able to provide developers with near real-time feedback on the code they're working on, freeing up resources for other parts of the business.”
Currently, QA Wolf customers pay for test coverage, not individual test runs or compute hours. QA Wolf supports mostly automated (but still human-involved) QA testing of Android and iOS apps, web apps, and Salesforce apps, and provides additional built-in capabilities for maintenance and bug reporting.
“We charge a flat rate that includes test creation, unlimited parallel test execution, and 24-hour fault investigation and maintenance,” Perl explains. “This pricing model aligns our incentives to deliver coverage as efficiently as possible with our customers' goals.”
Companies and investors seem to like this.
QA Wolf has more than 130 customers, including Salesloft, Drata and AutoTrader.ca. The company also closed a $36 million Series B funding round this week, led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Threshold Ventures, Ventureforgood, Inspired Capital and Notation Capital.
To date, QA Wolf has raised $57 million. Perl says the latest funding will be used to build out additional features to the platform, strengthen QA Wolf's existing automation technology, and add to its 130 employee base.
“The reason the various no-code or low-code tools on the market don't solve the QA test coverage gap is that when push comes to shove, users are either incentivized to ship new features instead of new tests, or they don't have the technical expertise to build comprehensive test coverage beyond the simplest workflow,” Perl says. “The benefit of QA Wolf is that when you take into account all of the infrastructure and effort to run and maintain comprehensive end-to-end test coverage, the value we provide is exponentially greater than other options.”