Every piece of software undergoes quality assurance testing, typically involving a human tester who creates test cases and checks the software interface for bugs and other issues.
On Tuesday, MuukTest, a startup based in Raleigh, North Carolina, announced a new AI agent designed to automate the creation of these tests.
“Since we started, the vision has been automating software QA technology to reduce test creation to a click, and that has been the whole vision,” said Ivan Barajas Vargas, co-founder and CEO, in an interview with TechCrunch.
These tools allow testers to examine every menu, button, and operation in the software user interface under various conditions to catch as many bugs as possible before the software is released.
CTO and co-founder Renan Ugalde explained that Barajas Vargas has 20 years of experience in software quality assurance testing. They aimed to leverage Ugalde’s engineering skills to capture this deep understanding and train an AI agent to build the test suites.
They combined several AI technologies, including large language models, traditional machine learning, computer vision, and image recognition. “We trained AI agents to think just like a QA tester, to understand the context within the application — understand what a menu is, what an input is, and when do you expect to see something,” Ugalde said.
This process requires reinforcement learning and extensive knowledge of the overall context and the founders’ QA experience to translate that into an AI agent.
The term “AI agent” has come to describe AI-driven software that assists with tasks, but there is no standard definition yet. For MuukTest, it acts as an intelligent assistant, performing many of the mundane tasks traditionally done by human QA testers.
The founders, who immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico in 2011, eventually settled into roles at Dell and IBM, respectively. They launched MuukTest in 2019 with the goal of reducing the effort required to generate and run QA tests.
Early versions of their solution used no-code and algorithms to create tests. With the new generative AI product, customers can describe the test suite they want, and MuukTest creates it automatically. The tests can then be run with a single click, significantly reducing the effort required.
MuukTest began to find product-market fit early last year. Even before adding the AI element, the company saw a 15x revenue increase over the previous year and expects to grow even faster with the new capabilities.
The company, which participated in the Mass Challenge startup incubator in Massachusetts the year it launched, has raised $6 million through investments and grants. With 36 employees and 10 contractors, Barajas Vargas says the company plans to remain conservative with its spending.
The new AI agent capability is available starting today.