Introducing Amikoo

We are thrilled to announce the biggest release we’ve ever done at MuukTest, which we believe will advance the Software QA and testing industry years into the future. Introducing Amikoo, our AI agent that automatically designs and automates a robust regression test suite for web applications.

Amikoo is the culmination of our National Science Foundation-funded AI research, 5 years of helping our customers automate and maintain robust regression test suites, and my co-founder Renan & my 20+ year careers in Software QA and engineering.

Amikoo is Personal

Twenty years ago, I got my first job in software testing. I quickly learned how difficult and demanding the role is - and how QA departments are always understaffed, overworked, and rarely appreciated.

In theory, everybody agrees that software testing is valuable and important. In practice, GOOD software testing has always been perceived as expensive, slow, and difficult. QA is the last department to receive investment, the first department impacted by budget cuts, and often a victim of its own success: When there are no bugs, QA/testing teams get cut. Then, when there are bugs, QA/testing gets reproached.

As a result, good software testers get burnt out, cynical, and often wind up job-hopping from layoff to layoff. I experienced this firsthand, and realized nearly five years ago that AI could stop this cycle. That’s why we started MuukTest.

When Renan and I founded MuukTest, our dream was to use AI to create and maintain full regression test suites. Why this? Simply: This is the most time-consuming, repetitive, and tedious part of software testing. Before AI, software testers had to learn Selenium (now Playwright), develop a testing strategy, run the tests manually, automate tests, quickly triage bugs, report the testing results. After all of that, then, maintain the automated test suites forever.

Even using the latest tooling, it took teams of experienced testers 6-12 months to get to 50%+ test coverage for a modern web application. Many software teams tried to build a regression test suite by hiring junior or low-cost offshore software testers. Few even achieved 10% test coverage, and fewer actually used the tests in their software development lifecycle.

We figured that if we could find some way to use AI to build and maintain a robust regression test suite, software testers wouldn’t have to do this work. Instead, they could focus on deep testing and testing new features in development. They could perform creative, exploratory testing. And they could curate the work of the AI, rather than doing all the tedious test automation and maintenance work themselves. 

This is the future I wanted as a Software Tester: One where I was involved in the software development process, using my creativity and deep knowledge of users to find defects, improve the overall quality process, and shift left the testing cycle to speed up time to production. Not one where features were thrown at me, rapid-fire, while I worked weekends to test the new and legacy features and try to build and maintain an automated regression test suite that had little chance of keeping up with development.

The Future of AI and QA

We believe that AI is not here to completely eliminate the Software QA department. We believe that QA and testing are so important, and the cost of failure is so high that any AI must augment human QA/testing experts rather than try to fully replace them. We have always seen AI as a tool to give humans superpowers, not a replacement. 

This belief comes back to our experience building MuukTest. Over the past five years, we built MuukTest as a software-plus-service, not JUST as a software tool. Why? Because we believed that the best way to get our customers to get the quality feedback they need was NOT to throw software at them and say, “good luck!” The “just software” approach does not work because TESTING is so important. When testing fails to catch bugs, customers do. This leads to preventable awful user experience, security vulnerabilities, negative customer feedback, churn, development grinding to a halt, employees quitting… and worse.

This is why we believe that a fully autonomous AI agent does not make sense in Software QA/testing, and why we deliver Amikoo as an AI agent with our human QA expert-in-the-loop as one bundled service. This isn’t like an AI sales-development-rep; any AI in the software testing department MUST work, or else your development team won’t trust it and won’t be able to ship bug-free with confidence. 

The Journey To Amikoo

So what does Amikoo do, and why are we so excited about it?

Before Amikoo, our software-plus-service built robust automated regression test suites that got software companies to 95%+ test coverage in about three months, which is extremely fast compared to the traditional alternatives (8-12 months plus 2+ QA/SDETs automating). This comes with unlimited maintenance, too - for one flat monthly fee, software companies get worry-free test automation. The best part? That flat monthly fee is less than half the cost of a software test engineer.

With Amikoo, we’re able to move even faster. We can automate hundreds and even thousands of tests in one month or less. As a result, we triage bugs extremely fast. We can also maintain tests at a speed that even the fastest software teams can’t outpace.

What this means for our customers is that they get an even better service: Complete regression test suites in days. Faster maintenance. Faster software quality feedback. New tests at the speed of their development team, as soon as the features are coded. Defects before customers. All managed by a QA expert, so our customers spend 15 minutes per week thinking about testing, maximum. And our customers’ QA teams can focus on testing during the development cycle, and exploring the application to find other kinds of bugs a regression suite wouldn’t find.

This is a big step towards our mission and the whole reason we built MuukTest in the first place. We’re so excited to bring Amikoo to every development team.

If you want to see what Amikoo can do for your team… grab a demo or email me directly: ivan at muuklabs.com

Press release here