Hi HN! It’s Mustafa. I’m the founder of Preflight (<a href="https://preflight.com" rel="nofollow">https://preflight.com</a>). Preflight is a no-code tool that automates manual web app testing. It lets everyone test the product by simply recording actions in the browser with a Chrome extension. Here’s a demo video: <a href="https://www.loom.com/share/4b09462bf52942e28b0dc71c9c0c319a" rel="nofollow">https://www.loom.com/share/4b09462bf52942e28b0dc71c9c0c319a</a>.<p>I was the first engineer at ShipBob and ended up hiring over 40 engineers. We had a lot of UI issues after we grew beyond a team of 5 or so. With all the engineers adding new code to the existing code, everything started to break.<p>That's when we started writing Selenium tests. I and several other engineers wrote 100 Selenium test cases in 2 months. But we were not able to maintain them in 3- 4 weeks because we had other responsibilities, and our Selenium test cases soon went to trash.<p>The problem with automated UI tests with Selenium or Cypress is that they depend on the internals of the design (e.g. via CSS and XPath selectors), resulting in tests that break frequently because of unrelated changes. When that happens, you either have to fix all the tests and run them again, or replace the broken automated tests with manual testing.<p>Then I hired 2 QA engineers, they took 5 months to come up with 5% test coverage and we needed more testing so we couldn't add more to it and maintain those tests as well. These issues pushed me towards creating a tool for automated testing that could understand the context of the page—the way humans do, not the way browser engines do—and can adapt to changes based on each steps' context. So if the UI changes completely and the test is looking for a Password Input in a sign-up form or an Orders menu item in the menu, we will find it without any related selectors.<p>As humans, we understand the page in terms of buttons, menus, headings, borders, and so on. I wanted to mimic that. On top of that we have implemented a way to understand navigations through these different elements with their context, again, as humans do. We call this Context-Awareness. It’s our secret sauce to adapt to the changes and also calculate what your test coverage is. Since we understand the context of each step, it’s pretty easy to see if, say, a given button is in the tests.<p>Here’s a video that shows the Context Awareness aspect I just mentioned: <a href="https://www.loom.com/share/50426244253943e49906dd881e0fb7d7" rel="nofollow">https://www.loom.com/share/50426244253943e49906dd881e0fb7d7</a>.<p>You record your tests using our browser extension, and then we run them on a bunch of Windows 10 machines that access your web app over the internet and execute the tests you recorded. We’re working on adding Macs. (Fun fact: Selenium cannot handle more than 40 nodes. The first version of Preflight was depending on Selenium Grid and it stopped working when we wanted to add more than 40 machines to it.)<p>We charge money based on how many tests you are planning to run. We don't want to limit you based on server time because it's not easy to predict how much server time your tests will take. So everything is based on test results.<p>Anyone can sign up and start using Preflight in minutes after signing up at <a href="https://app.preflight.com/get-started" rel="nofollow">https://app.preflight.com/get-started</a>.<p>Thank you for reading. I'd love to hear your thoughts and help all of you with any of your QA needs!
I'm actually in the market for a product like this right now. But I genuinely don't understand why you wouldn't publish your pricing, that's an immediate no-go for me.<p>Just a couple of days ago I started trying checkly [1] and have been quite happy, although I didn't try their browser testing yet. What do you offer over other services like this?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.checklyhq.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.checklyhq.com/</a>
Selenium IDE allows recording/playback of actions via browser extensions as well, without having to figure out the XPath, etc., yourself. Preflight looks much nicer than Selenium IDE interface, but is it much more different in its function?<p>Can you run Preflight on-prem or must the AUT be accessible to the Internet?<p>Regarding the Context Awareness, is there any issue with working with React apps? If I renamed an item in the navbar, or changed the position of an element (thus changing the XPath), would CA be able to identify and workaround that?<p>Questions aside, it’s a great idea and the app looks great.
I actually need this too right now, but without a pricing page I just move along.<p>I'm bombarded by vendors every day trying to "recapture" a sale, as part of an automated sales pipeline process.<p>I rarely provide contact details prior to being able to:<p>1) understand the product, what it does, and whether it will work for me<p>2) understand the pricing and sla<p>3) understand the business continuity model<p>I'd rather have a more difficult solution (selenium) that I know the above three points about than to get sucked into yet another sales pipeline.
Seems really promising, but how does it work with browser extensions? For instance, I'm looking for something like this that will help me test my crypto app that uses metamask at various points through the app.<p>Also, no public pricing page is a bit of a turn off, especially when I created an account and still couldn't find any pricing info.
I don't understand the OPs attitude around publishing basic information without signing up.<p>Here's the pricing for those who are curious:<p>Starter
- 300 tests/month
$99
/mo<p>Startup
- 1,000 tests/month
$300
/mo<p>Competitors are cheaper and include more tests.
Pricing: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/Hhv747C.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/Hhv747C.png</a><p>$99/mo 300 tests / month<p>$300/mo 1000 tests / month<p>Aside from hiding prices, the sign up process has another annoying dark pattern - you sign up, they prompt you to schedule onboarding call (only option, no other button), then if you click anywhere or wait a few seconds a "Continue to Dashboard" button appears. If you click it you have an "Are you sure?" button instead.<p>Instant turn off.
Why Windows/macOS and not Linux for the test runners? Chrome/Firefox runs just fine on Linux, and then you don't have to pay for licenses. (I suppose if you get one of those resale agreements with MS you wouldn't have to either as long as you bill the customer, but as the customer I don't care about what OS the browser is running on.)
Love the activity in this space. We are on the lookout for a tool like this with built in runtime performance monitoring (frame jank, composited layer size, long tasks, component render times, etc). Would happily pay for a service that could do so.
how's this compare to datadog synthetics? <a href="https://docs.datadoghq.com/synthetics/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.datadoghq.com/synthetics/</a>