Anika Begay
Every piece of software must go through software quality assurance testing. Typically, this involves a human tester creating a series of test cases and then checking the software interface for bugs and other problems.
On Tuesday, MuukTest, a Raleigh, North Carolina, startup, announced a new AI agent designed to help develop these tests in a much more automated way.
“From the beginning, the vision was to automate software QA technology to reduce test creation to one click, and that was the whole vision,” company co-founder and CEO Ivan Barajas Vargas told TechCrunch.
These tools allow testers to test every menu, button, and operation in the software’s user interface under multiple conditions, to try to find as many bugs as possible before the software is released to the public.
CTO and co-founder Renan Ugalde says Barajas Vargas has been involved in software quality assurance testing for 20 years, and they wanted to leverage Ugalde’s engineering expertise to gain that deep understanding and train an AI agent to help build the test suites.
They combined a variety of AI technologies to put that knowledge to work, including larger language models, traditional machine learning, computer vision, and image recognition. “We trained the AI agents to think just like a QA tester, to understand the context within the application, to understand what a menu is, what an input is, and when you expect to see something,” Ugalde said.
This requires reinforcement learning, as well as more context information and all the experience the two founders have in quality assurance to translate all of this into an agent.
Over time, “AI agent” has emerged as a term for AI-powered software that assists with a task or set of tasks, but at this point there is no standard definition. For MuukTest, it acts as an intelligent assistant, performing some of the more mundane tasks that a human QA tester would traditionally perform.
The founders emigrated to the United States from Mexico in 2011. Barajas Vargas eventually settled at Dell, while Ugalde landed at IBM, both growing in their careers with increasing levels of responsibility. They joined forces and launched MuukTest in 2019, where the goal has always been to reduce the amount of effort required to generate and run QA tests.
Early versions of their solution used algorithms and no-code to create tests, but with the new generative AI product, customers can simply describe the type of test suite they want and MuukTest automatically creates it for them. They can then run the AI-created test set with a single click, significantly reducing the amount of effort required, he said.
MuukTest really started to find product-market fit early last year. Even before the AI element was added to the product set, the company was doing well with a 15x increase in revenue last year versus the previous year, and it thinks it is poised to grow even faster with the new capabilities.
The company, which participated in Mass Challenge, a Massachusetts-based startup incubator, the year it launched, has raised a total of $6 million in funding and grants. With 36 employees and 10 contractors, Barajas Vargas says the company plans to be conservative when it comes to spending.
The new AI agent feature is available starting today.
