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Launch HN: TesterArmy (YC P26) – Agents that test web and mobile apps

Hey HN - we’re Oskar, Szymon, and Piotr, and we’re building TesterArmy (https://tester.army). TesterArmy is an agentic testing platform that runs end-to-end checks before deployment and in production. Instead of wasting hours on manual testing or maintaining static scripts, we let you specify your tests in natural language and handle everything in between. We've built the platform fully around agents. Our agent will reliably execute the tests, but your coding agent can manage everything in our platform, from defining tests in natural language to running them on your behalf.Check out our demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=291IkUbPrlk.We started TesterArmy because testing is still far too painful. AI coding tools have made it dramatically faster to write and ship code, but testing is still a bottleneck. Traditional E2E tests are slow to set up and expensive to maintain. Managing auth and test users is painful. Setting up staging environments is painful. Running tests reliably is painful.We think most teams do not actually want to spend their time writing selectors or maintaining test infrastructure. They just want confidence that their core flows work. With TesterArmy, an engineer can sign up, give an agent our CLI, and let it handle creating tests and running them on schedule or on GitHub.When something breaks, TesterArmy alerts your team through Slack or Discord.Over the past few months, we scaled from 0 to 30+ teams using our product every day. We caught bugs in critical flows, including onboarding, checkout, and AI chat. We've got many of our customers migrating from already established competitors to us because of the quality and reliability of our agents.Here are a few of the recent bugs that our agent found (there were quite a lot of them!):1) Timezone bug that affected the booking flow in one of our clients' apps, the dashboard was very complex and hard to catch by a human. 2) Regression in agent orchestration that caused a sandboxed environment to be stuck on loading, thanks to TesterArmy, the team was able to resolve it before it hit production. 3) Incorrectly counting the order amount in a complex dashboard flow with checkout, thanks to TesterArmy, the team was able to resolve it before it affected revenue 4) Catching a regression in an AI chat flow that would result in a user not being able to retrieve their data due to broken tool calling.And many more, mostly related to some incorrect API calls, 404s, unhandled errors, etc.If this sounds useful, we would love your feedback at https://tester.army. We have a bunch of free test runs for you to try. And don’t worry, we won’t make you do sales calls, and we don’t have long onboarding or annoying setup. Our goal is an it-just-works experience.If you're looking for an end-to-end testing solution, we'd love to hear your feedback!

51 points by okwasniewski - 27 comments

27 Comments

poisonborz [3 hidden]5 mins ago
E2E tests are now quick to write due to LLMs, and are then deterministic AND cheap to run. How would this compare to the token costs of running an agent the whole time for each test? How do you make sure results stay stable regardless of the nondeterministic nature? Do customers still need to create test cases - any way to import from test case management system - based on which they could have already generate e2e tests locally?
okwasniewski [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Unfortunately from our experience tests don’t scale as well as code. First of all, static tests are very brittle: you rely on selectors, need wait times, and can’t really test a lot of dynamic content (think AI chats/interactions). Then it’s all the infrastructure around it: solving captchas, handling auth, handling email OTP (each of our agents has access to its own inbox) and handling video recording and screenshots.

To ensure stable results we do a lot of harness engineering, where we inject trajectories of previous tests to ensure the stability and also the split into smaller steps helps to prevent context overload and decision fatigue.

Regarding test case management, our customers have used our CLI to migrate their existing test cases from whatever system they were using before.

dbbk [3 hidden]5 mins ago
"Traditional E2E tests are slow to set up and expensive to maintain." I don't really understand this. If I'm already using Opus to write the code, surely it would know best what E2E tests to write to be able to verify its own output? This seems like an unnecessary external step.
okwasniewski [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Unfortunately from our experience tests don’t scale as well as code. First of all static tests are very brittle, you rely on selectors, need wait times and can’t really test a lot of dynamic content (think AI chats/interactions). Then it’s all the infrastructure around it: solving captchas, handling auth, handling email OTP (each of our agents has access to its own inbox) and handling video recording and screenshots. So with the traditional testing approach you end up mocking a lot of services. I highly recommend you to give it a try!
RayFitzgerald [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Love your approach to product. It feels like TesterArmy will become the "Vercel for testing". Refreshing stuff!
okwasniewski [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Thank you! That's the goal
msencenb [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Have you been able to nail down a loop where your tool can take an open pr, guess the code path and do some testing?

We use cypress heavily for our core flows which has a similar ai prompt thing but it’s not quite ad hoc enough for smaller fixes which is where the bottleneck still comes in for us.

okwasniewski [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Yes! We spent quite a lot of time on this, and we are currently creating a test plan based on PR changes and sending an agent to verify it. We have some customers who are only using this feature.
tcoff91 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I'm curious how your mobile testing compares to https://revyl.com

I've been experimenting with Revyl and it's really nice. I think this agent-driven testing is the future.

okwasniewski [3 hidden]5 mins ago
We support both web and mobile, which is what a lot of companies prefer, just one agent for both. Also, I'm pretty sure Revyl relies only on vision models, which tend to be slower. We built the platform around a hybrid approach that combines vision and accessibility APIs, which is much faster.

Would love to hear your feedback after you try it out!

Laurel1234 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Seems interesting, but I wonder about this

> Traditional E2E tests are slow to set up and expensive to maintain.

Isn't this just using agents to create e2e tests or is there some better new approach I'm missing?

okwasniewski [3 hidden]5 mins ago
We use agents to navigate the app, making real-time decisions based on its state. I prefer to compare it more to a manual QA engineer than to static e2e tests. We spent a lot of time on the harness to make sure the results are reliable. This allows you to assert on dynamic content like AI-generated content. We also support validation of email flows since the agent can read its own email.
jaggederest [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Fable (rip) is absurdly good at this, great time to build a product around it, you definitely need the harness, but it feels like it just turned the corner to be able to do really in depth and edge case work.

Do you handle heterogenous environments and network connectivity simulation as well? I am working on a mobile app and occasionally having users just lose a request or two can put the state machine into unusual modes.

okwasniewski [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I feel like new AI model releases will only allow our agents to do more in-depth testing; the space still has a lot of room to grow. Quality assurance is way more complicated than just clicking around a UI.

Regarding the other question: not yet. For now, we have Chromium, iOS, and Android (latest versions of each), but we are working on adding more. Regarding network connectivity, it's coming soon (I have an open PR).

j0sip [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I wonder how does it compare to mobileboost.io, which has been used by some companies like Duolingo?
okwasniewski [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Our approach is heavily focused on agents, both for executing tests and for managing the platform. We want to provide the best and simplest way to conduct agentic testing, with a strong focus on details. It looks like their platform also requires a sales call.
yohguy [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Does it work of mobile native applications or expo apps that have native modules?

Pricing question, the usage on the plans seems low considering in the demo you said that you have 25 tests per pr which would mean you get only 10 PRs per month on the hobby plan?

okwasniewski [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Yes, it works for any framework. We just get the built native binary and run it in the cloud.

Regarding pricing, the self serve options are currently only for lower usage. We will add more plans further down the line. Currently the most popular one is the startup plan. If you need more usage I’m happy to discuss it on a call!

zuzululu [3 hidden]5 mins ago
not sure the pain point you mentioned resonate. with LLMs its very easy to do E2E testing. also I feel uneasy about outsourcing this part with all the security issues these days.
okwasniewski [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Unfortunately from our experience tests don’t scale as well as code.

First of all, static tests are very brittle: you rely on selectors, need wait times, and can’t really test a lot of dynamic content (think AI chats/interactions). Then it’s all the infrastructure around it: solving captchas, handling auth, handling email OTP (each of our agents has access to its own inbox), spinning up simulators and handling video recording and screenshots.

To ensure stable results we do a lot of harness engineering, where we inject trajectories of previous tests to ensure the stability and also the split into smaller steps helps to prevent context overload and decision fatigue.

Regarding security part, the product can operate solely without any access to the codebase, you can just give us a URL or a mobile app build and we will do the testing.

skinfaxi [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Goodness I really didn't expect such lazy copy-pasting of responses for a YC company.
rpunkfu [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Congratulations on launch, I’ve been tracking your progress since you’ve been accepted for spring batch.

Always happy to see cool products from Poland! :)

okwasniewski [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Thank you!
iknownthing [3 hidden]5 mins ago
.army?
okwasniewski [3 hidden]5 mins ago
We are thinking whether to change this.. We also have testerarmy.com/.ai
thih9 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Change it now to .com or get stuck there for years, suffering anti spam filters, potential renewal problems and more in the meantime.
tootubular [3 hidden]5 mins ago
You have the .com? That's a no-brainer imo. I have a domain for a saas where the .com is squatted so I settled for .ai (and other surrounding TLDs / host permutations) and right out of the gate ran into some issues with firewall vendors in corpo environments.