Eggplant AI

The Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence suite aims to automate every aspect of your product quality pipeline. In Eggplant AI’s case, AI and machine learning are used to automatically generate maximally covering test cases and actively target defects. In addition, to ensure your testing results in a good end-user experience, everything within Eggplant AI is done primarily from the perspective of an end user. Moreover, testing is not restricted to user journeys that appear sensible, taking the more realistic approach that any and every path through the application is a valid one, thus mimicking the real-world behaviour of your users.

Apart from Eggplant AI, the Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence suite also contains Eggplant Functional, for test execution, and Eggplant Release Insights, which provides metrics for measuring and analysing release quality, including predictors for upcoming releases. Outside the suite, Eggplant provides performance and load testing as well as various customer monitoring products, including an entire second suite of products – Eggplant Customer Experience Insights – dedicated to monitoring your application once it’s in production. The two suites are fully compatible, and are available together as Eggplant Customer Experience Optimization.

Customer Quotes

“It’s so important to test the whole product, and testing it through the UI is the best way to do that. By running and looking at an Eggplant script, you can tell what the user was doing, what the business logic was, and what the UX was intended to be… So far, I haven’t found anything that Eggplant can’t do.”
Conga

“Other tools focus on testing at the code level, but Eggplant allows us to test our systems like a user.”
Jet2

“Eggplant provides the best overall mix of capabilities from an end-to-end test perspective.”
BT

Mutable Award: Gold 2019

Eggplant AI uses model-based testing to graphically model your system under test, as shown in Fig-01

You can create your model manually, import an existing model, or generate your model automatically from Eggplant tests, Gherkin feature files, monitoring data, or other sources. This process is intelligent, and will detect all valid paths implicit in the imported files even if they are not defined explicitly, thus unlocking additional coverage from your existing assets without any additional effort.

Your model can then be leveraged to automatically generate test cases, using AI to maximise the increase in test coverage that each new test case provides. You can create test cases manually by selecting a path through your model, import existing test cases from, say, Selenium, and weight individual parts of your model to make them proportionally more or less likely to be used in your automatically generated tests. Furthermore, the product uses machine learning to identify and understand patterns in your tests. This includes risk patterns, which can be leveraged alongside monitoring information to ensure that the most critical or valuable tests are always executed first, as well as any common patterns in your failing tests, which will be repeated in new tests until they stop resulting in failures, at which point they will gradually (and automatically) be unlearnt.

Fig 02 – A coverage heat map in Eggplant AI

Your generated test cases will be executable if the corresponding parts of your model have been equipped with code snippets, which can be written manually or generated automatically using Eggplant’s ‘autosnippets’ image capture functionality. In addition, an accelerator allows you to generate your model directly from these autosnippets. Eggplant’s Universal Fusion Engine allows you to execute your scripts against any system, browser or device non-intrusively and without modifying any of your testing assets, and you have several ways of viewing your test results, including a coverage heat map as seen in Figure 2.

Eggplant also provides performance testing via Eggplant Performance, which is highly integrated with Eggplant AI. To wit, any Eggplant AI model can be used to create performance tests automatically. This goes a long way in making performance testing more accessible.

For Eggplant, testing should, above all else, increase customer satisfaction and improve the experience of the end user. In their words, testing should result in a product that “delights” its users. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. According to Eggplant’s research, the vast majority of companies which employ testing are regularly meeting their testing objectives, yet only a small fraction considers themselves to be meeting customer expectations. Not only that, but on average, almost a third of IT budgets are spent on testing and QA, yet close to 90 percent of QA teams cannot keep up with their workload. In short, current testing is both insufficient and laborious. There is only one plausible solution: automation, and lots of it.

Accordingly, the automation present in Eggplant AI is extremely extensive, to the point that even test design is handled primarily via AI. This automation is suitable for either replacing or augmenting your more manual efforts, but either way it promises to dramatically increase the speed at which you can produce test assets, while at the same time maximising coverage and minimising bias. Moreover, the product provides several highly automated methods for generating your initial model, whether you have a suite of existing test assets or not. This makes it exceedingly fast and easy to get up and running with an Eggplant AI model, and by extension Eggplant AI.

The other products Eggplant offers are also highly valuable. Performance testing is a key component for ensuring a good customer experience – poorly performing apps are rarely well received – and the sophisticated and extensive release and customer monitoring Eggplant provides is highly useful for shifting right, managing change, and ensuring that your applications continuously improve over their entire lifetime. In combination, these products allow Eggplant to deliver a vast swathe of testing capability within a single platform via an intuitive, uniform experience. Furthermore, this intuitiveness allows your existing nontechnical users easy access to your testing process, empowering them to play an active role in it.

The Bottom Line

Eggplant is laser focused on enabling you to provide an exceptional customer experience via highly efficient and automated testing backed up by extensive analytics. Eggplant AI is both a core part of the company’s offering and a leading product in the Test Design Automation space. It should not be overlooked.