1515 – Software Testing with qase.io’s Nikita Fedorov

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0:54With us right now, Nikita Fedorov. Nikita, you are in Austin, Texas, and you are the founder at Case. And Case is spelled Q-A-S-E. Your website is case.io. Nikita, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for inviting. It is a pleasure to be here. Yeah. Also, Nikita, fun fact. So you're a sci-fi fan. What are you watching these days? So I'm a fan of Marvel, and I'm a fan of fiction books. My favorite author is Sheckley. I love him. Awesome. Awesome. All right. Good deal. All right. Well, Nikita, give us an overview of what Case is. Case you launched about six years ago. Congratulations on that.

1:44And so Case makes it easy to manage test cases. It's a test ops platform. But can you explain what that means for maybe non-techies? Yeah. So, and I want to start with a short story of how that all started. Yes, I was working as engineering manager in a company, pretty big company. And I was leading several teams and we didn't have software testing at all. We had so many bugs. Customers were complaining. in, they were churning, and I had to hire a team and find a tool to support my team. And occasionally, all of them were ugly. They were from 90s with big print button. And I thought, wow, how that could be possible in 2016?

2:38So I've decided to build a tool by myself to support my teams. And initially, yes, that was a classical test management solution. But lately, I've realized that the problem is a little bit bigger. People were using different tools for manual and automated testing. And it was extremely hard to understand what is going on in the company. So I've decided to bring together manual and automated testing to provide transparency of what's going on in your company. and a few years later i've realized we have another big problem people were using from 20 to 40 different tools for software testing every day software testing frameworks yes and we have decided to build a single platform single workspace for all your software testing activities So that covers the whole software development lifecycle.

3:44Yeah. So what we're talking about here, because looking at your website, so Case integrates with all major issues trackers. So it's got Slack integration, Asana, Jira, Trello, etc. So I guess in my brain, I would think that issue trackers is what case does. But maybe you can help me understand that a little bit better about what is the difference between an issue tracker? Because I mean, I know what that is, right? So I guess it's, you know, hopefully we have an issue, gets reported, that needs to be fixed. Or we're kind of going through the software and just kind of trying to break it. I mean, this is, so I launched my first, you know, kind of software application back in 2007.

4:36And that was usually it. Like we would just experiment. And then when we found something that was working inconsistently or we didn't like, or, you know, it was just, then we would add it to the issue tracker. And then hopefully we would see that get resolved, testing, verify, okay, cool, publish. and so where does case fit in that? Yeah so when you want to build a new feature in your application you create a task or issue in issue management such like NJira, Sana and etc but when you have built it you have to test it to verify that it works as expected and you have you write tests They can be manual, automated, AI tests, and etc.

5:27It's not a problem when you have only one feature in the application. But that's a problem when you have a lot of different features, a lot of user scenarios. For example, authorization, adding a product to the cart, and etc. And usually your product evolves. You add new features, you rework existing. and you have to manage all these changes in these tests. So here we are. We are a test management, test ops platform. So KS provides three core values to our customers. Test management. So you know what tests you have in your company across different projects, products, you have applications. The second is test reporting.

6:23We aggregate results of test execution in one place. Manual tests, automated tests, and et cetera. And third, test analytics. We provide analytics based on historical data on how your software testing process works. What problems you have, what gaps you have, how you can improve. because nowadays software testing is a little bit underestimated, but it affects time to market. For example, people often think, okay, we have to build this feature. Let's give an estimate. But you also have to give an estimate for software testing because you spend one hour to build your feature, and then you can spend two hours one day just to test it, fix bugs in this.

7:16So we help to understand what is going on and give insights, advices, how you can improve your software testing activities and reduce them to marketing. In your blog, you've got the top QA fails of 2022. Yeah. Yeah. Which I'll kind of just kind of give some of the highlights of last year. Southwest had some issues that resulted in a lot of bad press ended up being very, very expensive. just old software, Google Pixel, Tesla, and even Taylor Swift. Would you mind maybe kind of talking about, you know, some of, you know, one or two of these and how does this stuff happen? So there can be a lot of different reasons for that.

8:20for example when you don't have a test management solution you manage everything in a spreadsheet somebody can overwrite your tests you can forget to execute something and that brings you to a failure. Or for example, you don't have necessary input data. Because okay, we want to test a login function. And we have to enter your username, email, password, and here you are. If you have different account types, you have to test all of them but sometimes people forget they use our test only one type okay login works so so many different reasons so many moving parts and if we yes in fact we have about two or three uh news posts about feathers in aviation.

9:33Yes, yesterday we've published another one.

9:42So, for example, like with Taylor Swift, for example, who broke Ticketmaster, Which, by the way, I don't think a lot of people have too much love lost for Ticketmaster, especially artists. But Ticketmaster couldn't handle it. And, you know, how would Case potentially be a platform that someone like a Ticketmaster could use to say, hey, look, T-minus, you know, four weeks until Taylor Swift's concert tickets are going to go on sale. It is absolutely going to ping the needle. How do you, like, how do you test for stuff like that? Just like do load testing or I don't even know. Like, again, I'm the non-technical guy trying to imagine this.

10:37Yeah, yeah. Technical, non-technical. Yeah. If you're SMB, in fact, you don't need load testing. You have to solve these problems in a few years when you're mid-market or enterprise. But when you're a big company with millions of clients, you have to use load testing. and uh case is not focused on load testing right now that's what we don't do there are a lot of different solutions on the market that can do but we can integrate and show if everything goes well uh and uh i prefer to think about case as a analytical platform for your software testing to show problems you have. Okay, you have to look there or you have to adjust something there and you can improve.

11:38So anyway, you have to do some homework, write some tests, because only you know how your product works. We can't tell you, yes, how your product works. Well, the developer community seems to really love you because I'll tell you on G2, you guys are dominating. Thanks. Yeah, you've won high performer award, momentum leader award, easiest admin for small business award, easiest to use, highest user adoption for small business, best relation. I mean, you've got, you're getting all these awards. So obviously something's going right here. You've created something pretty helpful. Thanks. Thanks. and interesting fact that we have reached current valuation, current revenue without any marketing or sales on a pure word of mouth.

12:34So yes, pure organic growth. Yes, we have hired last year, we have hired marketing, sales and all that stuff. But I'm so proud that we got these results on a word of mouth. Yeah. Well, that's got to be nice as a tech founder. How did you launch Case? Oh, that was awesome. So I was working for several years after the day job. I was building this solution. I'm a developer myself. I was building this solution by myself because I had necessary skills to do that. I knew what I want. And I had a small graveyard of pet projects that were never released. I think that every developer has such on their hard drive.

13:32So I've realized, okay, this product will go live. It can fail. It can succeed. But it will go live anyway. I've released it. I purchased first advertisement. I spent 50 US dollars, as I remember. And I've got first 100 users. And I've noticed that some of them started using case every day. That was a shock for me. I was shocked. Wow. I did something valuable. And there was no way back. I had to work more and more and more. Then I've met our first angel investor. He offered us a small check. Oh, you're doing great stuff. Yeah. Please take money. Yes. And start earning. So we have got this money.

14:32I've hired first developer. We have launched paid plan, got our first revenue. That was 80 US dollars. I will remember this 80 US dollars. Oh, yeah, we all remember that first$80. Yeah. Yeah. Someone gave me money. Yeah, yeah. That was that was awesome moment. And then I've hired more people because when you are building a company from scratch, you can do everything by yourself. That's a very big problem of technical founders. Because of the nature of our nature our work when you write code you get your feedback immediately it works or it doesn't work and you want to build everything by yourself i know how to build i know i will do but that's a a tricky way you can't do everything you have to hire people you have to hire right people who will do stuff and the main lesson I've learned from running this company is that you have to hire people who will hire people who will hire people you can for example you can hire a great manager but him please check that he will be able to hire another manager He can hire, for example, engineers, but he won't be able to scale.

16:13Well, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, just we just have a minute or so left here. You know, you guys have been, you know, Meetup is using you, Crypto.com is using you, Chatfuel, Asana, JobTarget, SeatGeek, I mean, some pretty big names, but you also serve a lot of SMBs. pricing starts at free for up to three users in your team. So, you know, I always love those models where you can, you know, at least kind of get in and play with the software and kind of see what it's able to do. And then you go all the way up, of course, to enterprise, your website, again, case.io. You could either, I guess, click start for free or like, who would be appropriate, but you can also book a demo.

17:02Who would be a good person to book a demo? A good person. So if you are a developer or engineering manager or head of QA or CTO, you can book a demo. So we have the other demo for all these roles because there are two types of people who are using K's. The first one is engineers who wants to solve their daily routine to improve it, to reduce time spent on software testing. And the second is managers. They want to get transparency on what's going on. They want to get control. They want to measure because you can't control things you can't measure. You always have, for example, we want to improve software testing.

17:54Okay, what's our starting point what's our a and what's our b where we are going where we are heading so and case helps uh it shows you what where you are now and tracks the progress for example you want to you have a lot of manual testers and you want to go into automation with case you can track your progress of for example over the last two weeks we have added uh 10 automated tests over the last quarter we have added 50 500 automated tests now we have 50 percent of automation we have reduced our manual efforts from 100 hours per week to 10 hours per week and etc some case can answer these questions to managers.

18:55All right. Nikita Fedorov, thank you so much for joining us again. You're the founder of Case. You're an industry. Folks love you. Thanks. Your website is case.io. That's Q-A-S-E dot I-O. Nikita, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. It was a pleasure to meet you.

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