• About & Contact Us
  • SEO Community

Ulancer.com

    • Latest Stories

      What is new?

    • Meet the startups that pitched at EF’s 10th Demo Day in London

      September 27, 2018

    • Rally Rd., the app that lets you invest in classic cars, raises $7M Series A

      September 27, 2018

  • News
  • How to’s
  • Writing
  • Startups
  • Jobs
  • More
    • CMS Tools
    • APPS
    • Web Resources
      • Advertising
      • Firefox
      • Scripts
      • Tools

With $10M in funding, Mabl brings machine learning to software testing

  • by Ulancer Contributor
  • In Startups
  • — 21 Feb, 2018


Mabl, a startup that’s coming out of stealth today, uses machine learning to make functional testing for developers as easy as possible. Mabl users don’t have to write extensive (and often brittle) tests by hand. Instead, they show the application the workflow they want to test and the service performs those tests — and even automatically adapts to small user interface changes.

The Boston-based company also today announced that it has raised a $10 million Series A funding round from CRV and Amplify Partners.

It’s worth noting that the team behind Mabl has a bit of a pedigree. Co-founders Izzy Azeri and Dan Belcher previously founded Stackdriver, the cloud monitoring solution Google acquired in 2014. After a few years at Google, during which time the company deeply integrated Stackdriver into its Cloud Platform, the founders decided to try something new, though, and left Google last January. “As we met with hundreds of software teams, we latched on to this idea that developing — the process of writing new code and integrating it with your code bases — is very fast now, but there’s a bottleneck in QA,” Azeri said. “Every time you make a change to your product, you have to test this change or build test automation.”

So with Mabl, the team is trying to bring this process into the 21st century by combining functional testing (that is, actually trying out the front end of the application and looking at the results) with machine learning. Right after signing up for Mabl, the service starts scanning your site and starts looking for potential errors. You then create your own tests by walking Mabl through a scenario (with the help of a Chrome plugin) and the service automatically understands that a given button or link leads to a certain action. As long as the service can somehow identify that button, for example, it’ll perform the same test, even if you are experimenting with a new user interface and move it to a new position on your page. “If there’s something unique, we’ll find it, even if it’s in a different spot,” explained Belcher.

Mabl will alert developers of any visual changes, JavaScript errors, broken links and increased load times.

Given that the founding team came from Google, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Mabl is running on the Google Cloud Platform. But as Azeri and Belcher told me, they actually gave their engineers free rein to pick AWS or another platform, too. Google won that vote and the team now makes heavy use of tools like the Google Kubernetes Engine for spinning up containers for tests, Google Cloud Functions, BigQuery, Cloud ML Engine and App Engine.

During the preview period, the service will be free to all developers. After that, the team — which currently consists of about 20 people — will start monetizing the service, likely with a focus on charging users for the amount of testing they do. What exactly this will look like, though, still remains to be seen.

Current Mabl users, who started testing the service during its closed beta, include the likes of RunKeeper, creative agency 24G and Codeship. “Mabl frees up Codeship’s team to build product, and that’s great for our customers. Nobody on the team has to worry about testing; everyone knows if there’s an issue, Mabl will tell us, then we’ll fix it and move on,” said Moritz Plassnig, the co-founder and CEO of Codeship.

As Azeri and Belcher noted, funding this new company was a bit easier than raising funding for Stackdriver. CRV, they told me, had wanted to invest in Stackdriver but missed out on that opportunity (and the company’s exit to Google), so it’s maybe no surprise that CRV partner Murat Bicer really wanted to invest in the founders this time around. Indeed, Bicer is joining Mabl’s board of directors.

Developers who want to give the service a try can now sign up here.


News source

You might also like...

  • Media startup Prøhbtd raises $8M to help bring cannabis to the mainstream 11 Jun, 2018
  • Datree gets $3M seed round to build DevOps policy engine in GitHub 29 Aug, 2018
  • Scribd will get Veronica Roth’s ‘Fates Divide’ on launch day 9 Apr, 2018
  • Keepsafe launches a privacy-focused mobile browser 19 Jun, 2018
  • Previous story Meet crypto authors Michael Casey and Paul Vigna in New York next week
  • Next story This bizarre reality special from Netflix tries to get people to commit ‘murder’
  • RSS
    Receive Freebies & Latest Posts Directly To Your Email - it's Free!

    • Recent Posts
    • Most Popular
    • Comments
    • 7hrCggmJ-AMMeet the startups that pitched at EF’s 10th Demo Day in LondonSeptember 27, 2018
    • oNo38LV2tQIRally Rd., the app that lets you invest in classic cars, raises $7M Series ASeptember 27, 2018
    • Nearby.gifBerkanan is a Bluetooth-powered group messaging appSeptember 27, 2018
    • 2122.pngVinay Gupta to talk about Mattereum at Disrupt BerlinSeptember 27, 2018
    • slider_wp_03Best collection of WordPress Slider PluginsJuly 5, 2010
    • Joomla template builderTop 8 Free Joomla Template GeneratorsJuly 19, 2011
    • 40+ Best WordPress Plugins for Comments40+ Best WordPress Plugins for CommentsJune 18, 2011
    • wptheme2A Collection of Free WordPress ThemesJuly 11, 2010
    • Bharat Sarkari Naukri on:Spotify acquires online music studio Soundtrap as it goes after creators
    • PMP on:Online learning platform Unacademy gets $21M Series C from Sequoia India, SAIF and Nexus
    • Predictive Eye on:Element.AI opens London outpost with focus on ‘AI for good’
    • SmartCursors on:4 Tips for Keeping Your Freelance Finances In Order
  • Staff Picks

    • slider_wp_03Best collection of WordPress Slider PluginsJuly 5, 2010
    • Joomla template builderTop 8 Free Joomla Template GeneratorsJuly 19, 2011
    • 40+ Best WordPress Plugins for Comments40+ Best WordPress Plugins for CommentsJune 18, 2011
  • Recent Posts

    • Meet the startups that pitched at EF’s 10th Demo Day in London
    • Rally Rd., the app that lets you invest in classic cars, raises $7M Series A
  • Search Our Blog

  • Ulancer is an insightful freelance blog and resource site. We provide intuitive articles that cover Photoshop tutorials, time-saving management tips covering a broad range of topics. We also have an active freelance community forum, there you can meet other freelancers that share your common interest, socialize and chat about freelance trending news as the occurred.

© Copyright 2013 Ulancer.