Nalin Parbhu, Founder and CTO of Infuse Consulting and useMango™, discusses the creation and specifications of the useMango™ test automation tool.

How we came to create a test automation tool

I believed in test automation so much that I left a large consultancy to start my own test automation company in 2002.

Manual testing simply didn’t make sense to me. “If I’m going to run it more than once, I’m automating it” was my simple mantra. I also knew that offshore was coming over the hills back in 2002, and they were cheap, so I needed to specialise. The only way to survive was to differentiate.

So Infuse did. We went to the largest test tool vendor at the time, formed a partnership and built a test automation tool and framework that parsed manual instructions and converted them to automated test scripts. The solution worked on Web, Delphi, Windows GUI and Terminal Emulators.

I was hyper-technie then. I wanted to code. As I got quite good at it, I’d write my own libraries with the Infuse team. We were doing automated builds and deployments in ANT while load testing Java methods in the JVM container whenever code got checked in, long before the DevOps revolution took hold in 2002. We built MMS/SMS plug-ins load test tools for telco based on output from network packet sniffing tools.

On a sales visit, we came across a 3i backed start-up called Intuwave, and they had this remote control support application call m-Network. The salesperson we had at the time had an idea about using m-Network as a bridgehead to control and test a Symbian mobile phone to test mobile applications. We built a test automation framework and accelerator for it, and then, with a genius software engineer named Peter Vandenberk, wrapped it into a scriptless testing framework. It could be run from enterprise tools or simply from built using an Excel document created by a non-technical tester.

We called the solution m-Test. It was one of the first mobile phone test tools ever created. We sold it to Nokia, Sony Ericcson and Vodafone. Everything was looking good and then Mercury bought the technology for m-Test. That’s it, I thought. I’m going to retire for zillions, doing all of the services and selling my tool and framework as a product. Sadly, HP soon bought Mercury and then retired the m-Test product. It didn’t see a future in the mobile applications market in 2006.

Infuse has always sought opportunity for innovation. Pioneering is a long journey, which brings us to how we came to create useMango™.

Drivers for change

The world is hyper dynamic and increasingly connected. This is accelerating all three forms of change event: business, compliance, and technical.

Brexit is an example of a compliance event, along with HR changes, tax rules. Digital Transformation, upgrades, patches, and cloud are technology events. And takeovers, mergers and changes in businesses that lead to system change are business events. These change events demand that systems be tested faster than ever before to avoid damages to the business.

Business demands agility, speed and quality in a short time frame. And that means automating testing early in the lifecycle to delivery faster, smarter and better than the competition.

So why don’t we just automate all the testing?

There are four main challenges around automated testing, as shown in the illustration. These challenges often make it difficult if not impossible to achieve the right level of automated testing without the proper tools.

What is useMango™?

Test automation typically requires test engineers to create tests in a test automation framework, which is either vendor-specific or test engineer-specific. It’s a technical endeavour and in small teams, this is fine. However, when you are dealing with global business users, such as HR, Finance, Supply Chain, Underwriting and Claims Management, then a technical test engineered framework needs to be leveraged for non-technical purposes and users.

useMango™, quite simply, is a functional automated test tool designed for non-technical users, business testers and the business itself. The outputs of useMango™ can be used to drive business process robotics to automate your business process.

useMango™ integrates into and with Enterprise tools and Open Source tools, such as Selenium, Jenkins and Appium to help you test your ERP applications, such as SAP and Oracle as well as Web applications.

How does useMango™ work?

In short, there’s a five step process with useMango™ (see illustration).

How much does it cost?

useMango™ is a very cost effective test automation tool. It’s available as a cloud-based delivery or SaaS service. We even offer it combined with enterprise tooling on SaaS on a pay-as-you-go model on AWS and HPE Cloud.

Reference customers

JD Williams, CSC, the world’s largest exhibitions company uses it for System Integration Testing on a complex digital platform, and the largest standing army in Western Europe pays its personnel with software that has been tested by useMango™.

Who should use it?

If you want to build test automation at scale for your business application like SAP, Oracle E-Business Suite or Web application, then useMango™.

If you want to input 1000 business process entries into your business systems, then leverage useMango™ to deliver operational efficiency faster, better and smarter.

We have just released useMango™ 4.0, please visit: http://infuse.it/products/usemango-test-automation/