Meet Waldo: Automated testing for mobile

Mobile QA is a nightmare for any engineer, designer, product, or whoever’s responsible for testing UX or UI changes to their app. If you’ve QA tested for mobile, you’re likely nodding your head in agreement. If not, you now know why your team was huffing and puffing in the corner while trying to push a new release on deadline.

I know because I’ve been there. I’ve held various roles as an iOS engineer, designer, and product manager on mobile teams (primarily B2C apps) for eight years. Mobile QA testing was once the bane of my existence. So much so, that I, along with my brilliant and supportive co-founders and team, built a solution: waldo.io.

Waldo is your mobile QA process in one tool. It’s designed to help you deliver mobile UX perfection on every device, with every release, every time. It provides automated mobile QA tests that are quick, easy, and reliable. Here’s our story.

Mobile QA sucks.

We built Waldo because mobile QA is broken. More specifically:  

1. QA is a bottleneck in the product dev process. When planning the launch of a new release, mobile teams tend to overlook QA testing and the amount of time it takes. So when the time comes to submit to the app store and the team realizes they need to test the new flow, they’re met with hours of unexpected work or an investment to outsource it.
2. Automated mobile QA is hell on earth for anyone responsible for it. Automated mobile QA tests are sensitive and flaky. If anything changes in your mobile design or code, they fail. This is a big issue, as the whole point of testing your app is to track your design changes. Unnecessary failures are frustrating and generally push the team to let go of automated tests.
3. Mobile QA testing is expensive. Since it’s such a miserable and time-consuming experience, most app builders or app companies outsource their mobile QA tests. Those service providers are not cheap. If you conduct your tests in-house, you’re using a ton of engineering time…also not cheap.

What does this all mean for your business?

Time is money, and small and medium-sized teams have limited resources. Conducting tests yourself means time away from building, designing, selling, etc. If you’re pushing a new release to squash a major bug causing users to churn or abandon their cart, that’s money down the drain.

Most apps push a new release every two weeks. Imagine the time crunch if you have to outsource or start testing your app every ten days. Woof. There has to be a better way.

Meet Waldo, your mobile QA process in one tool.

Here’s a quick video overview of how Waldo works:

To elaborate, small and lean teams should be able to test the apps they poured their heart and souls into on their own, and they shouldn’t have to spend a fortune doing so. They also shouldn’t want to ram their head in the wall in order to deliver a top-notch user experience.

We wanted to make the lives of people doing QA more enjoyable. Heck, we’d make everyone’s life more enjoyable if we could. Why not start with QA folks?

Here’s how it works:

1. It’s easy, no coding skills needed. Waldo lets you record your app’s flow on your browser. You upload your app file (ipa/apk) and BLAM-O, you are ready to go, no more test scripting. Anyone can do it!
2. It’s reliable. Waldo is built to understand changes within the app. It won’t break every time you move a button or change your designs. It’s smart in the way it replays your flows and is able to navigate the natural ambiguity of UI changes.
3. It’s scalable. You can run as many tests as you want, quickly! No hours spent laboring over tests. No limit to how many tests you run. You can sleep easy knowing your users are getting the experience you intended…because you’ve tested the crap out of it.
4. It removes repetitive tasks. We, engineers, hate repetitive tasks, that’s why we’re the masters of automation. Waldo removes boring, monotonous repetition for your product team.
5. It tests like a human. Waldo uses and tests the app like a user would use it. We don’t use faked data. We use your real app, record the real data, and identify the changes in your flows.

My favorite thing about Waldo is that it allows you to see all your flows and flow changes laid out in an elegant, simple way. Our flows are easy and approachable so anyone on your team – from engineers to product managers to support to marketing – can see and understand what changes were to your app and why.

Want to be one of the firsts to try Waldo?

We’d love to have you onboard as a beta user! Sign up to try it for free here.

Do you have a QA story? Share it with us at hello@waldo.io.