Eggplant adds new features to AI test automation suite

Eggplant has made upgrades to its Digital Automation Intelligence Suite, including web-based low-code tooling, accessibility testing, unified object-based and visual testing, and digital twin integration.

The Digital Automation Intelligence Suite is an AI test automation program focused on the customer experience. Eggplant claims that the new capabilities simplify and speed up the testing process by automating up to 80% of testing activities. This, according to Eggplant, enables rapid accelerate testing and integration with DevOps.

The web-based low-code tooling enables QA teams to more easily access guided and auto-generated test assets. This accelerates and automates the testing phase and significantly shortens the time to value, according to Eggplant.

Eggplant has also automated accessibility testing, which means that organizations can stay compliant while continually improving the user experience.

However, Thomas Murphy, senior director analyst at Gartner, said that it will still require some manual testing.

"Automated Accessibility Testing is an interesting area, but really requires manual testing support," he said. "Accessibility includes people who have visual challenges, so how do you automate testing text to voice? Or validate that voice to text operates correctly?"

Unified object-based and visual testing is a single view that enables the power of both visual testing and object-based testing to be integrated. According to Eggplant, this extends the benefits of noninvasive, visual testing with easy access to underlying properties.

Eggplant has also added digital twin integration to interactively define an application's digital twin via a web-based graphical interface. This can be used to drive intelligent automated testing, according to Eggplant.

The Digital Automation Intelligence dashboard has also been upgraded and now provides a single snapshot of all testing metrics, including the return on investment of automation technology.

The suite currently includes Eggplant AI, Eggplant Functional and Eggplant Release Insights.

Eggplant AI has graphical tooling, has algorithms to select the next best test to run, contains a model-based approach to minimize the build and maintenance effort, can import existing assets to create models, has graphical analysis of coverage and test results, and automates any test automation engine, including Eggplant Functional and Selenium.

Release Insights works with Eggplant AI to glean data insights and analytics from CI/CD pipelines, including user- and business-focused metrics that gauge release quality and its impact on the user or consumer.

Eggplant Functional is a test automation software that tests UIs, including text and images, from the user perspective, through API and WebDriver object automation.

Murphy said he thinks this is a nice launch for Eggplant, but not especially unique in the market.

"Most companies are bringing increasing amounts of AI and [machine learning] to bear in their tools, and several are model- or low-code drive," he said. "Overall, [Eggplant] has been doing interesting things for several years, but I do believe that a lot of the current AI-oriented test stuff is a bit of an overreach. Maybe it will get there, but it isn't yet."