If 2020 pushed software testing and quality into the spotlight, 2021 cemented its importance as consumers continued to seek out digital-first connections with brands. Quality assurance found itself at the center of DevOps adoption, accelerating production cycles, and the need to create better customer experiences. To adapt, they embraced quality engineering.
There’s no question that 2022 will continue to push the quality engineering field to new heights. But before we jump into the new year, it’s important to recognize some mabl milestones that happened in 2021.
Growing the mabl Test Automation Platform
Quality engineering, the practice of data-driven testing throughout the entire development cycle, enables quality assurance professionals to ask bigger questions about product performance and accessibility…but only if teams have the skills and toolset to do so. Mabl’s mission is to help teams adopt quality engineering with low-code test automation that allows everyone to quickly create automated tests. To do so, we’re continuously expanding mabl’s capabilities.
Launching The mabl Desktop App
It’s hard to believe that we only launched the new mabl desktop app in February. The expanded test automation platform introduced a unified, intuitive interface for creating, editing, running, and managing automated tests without switching between a web application, command line interface, and Chrome Extension. In doing so, it created a centralized home for a quality engineering strategy. Every user is able to integrate API testing, mobile web testing, cross browser testing, and more for a comprehensive automated testing strategy that captures the full user journey.
New Features and Integrations for Quality Engineering
Of course, more testing is only useful if it’s actionable. Throughout 2021, we introduced new features designed to help quality engineering leaders manage their testing efforts and collaborate with the rest of the development team for faster bug detection and easier triaging.
The mabl activity feed introduced a centralized hub for software testing activity, providing full visibility into a team’s testing strategy for better collaboration. The feed includes important details like who created or altered tests, what changes were made to Javascript snippets and reusable flows, and recent test updates. This allows quality engineering leaders to easily manage their automated testing strategy, even as software testing is scaled across the development pipeline.
As quality engineering teams adopt continuous testing, they’ll need seamless ways to collaborate with product managers, developers, and customer support. Mabl introduced several useful integrations this year to make this possible: Jira and Microsoft Teams. These native integrations make it possible to share test results directly into two of the most popular collaboration tools in the industry. Mabl can automatically create Jira tickets for failed tests with in-depth diagnostic data, drastically reducing the time needed to address defects. Similarly, mabl can now also share test results directly in Teams for simple, automatic collaboration across the software development organization.
Growing the Software testing and Test Automation Community
We hosted our second annual mabl Experience event in October. The international gathering attracted virtual attendees from 26 countries, representing every continent except Antarctica. Despite being distributed quite literally around the globe, Experience was united by a focus and passion for software quality: 65% of participants said they were in a quality assurance or quality engineering role.
Mabl Experience featured 29 speakers across 15 panels, including leaders and mabl customers like Chewy, Charles Schwab, SmugMug, Barracuda, Sensormatic, Enbridge, BitSight, Arch Insurance, and Stack Overflow. They discussed everything from how to improve test coverage, transitioning from manual to automated testing, implementing sustainable culture change, and how to climb the QE career ladder.
Mabl’s Series C Funding
Finally, mabl celebrated a major milestone in our journey to build the leading SaaS solution for quality engineering: a $40 million Series C funding round. The investment, led by Vista Equity Partners’ Endeavor Fund, caps off an incredible year of growth and industry recognition, including being named a “Best Place to Work” by BuiltIn Boston and “Best of Show” in Software Development Testing by the SDTimes. With the new funding, we’re accelerating hiring across all departments, including sales, finance, marketing, engineering, product, customer support, customer success, and people operations.
Ready, Set, GROW
If mabl had a 2021 motto, it would likely be “make test automation easy.” It’s how our customers describe our test automation platform and summarizes how mablers envision our user experience. As we head into 2022, that mindset shifts into growth: we’ll continue growing mabl’s intelligent software testing capabilities to best serve quality engineering teams, expand the mabl team, and help our customers grow their quality engineering practice.
Thank you for taking this journey with us, whether you’re a mabler, customer, or partner, you have a valuable role to play in this exciting new world of quality engineering. We hope you have a safe, happy, and healthy new year!
