TestObject, which offers a cloud-based service for the automated testing of Android apps, has raised funding from Frühphasenfonds Brandenburg, an initiative of the Investitionsbank Brandenburg, and S&S Media’s investment arm, West TechVentures. The amount is being disclosed simply as a ‘seven digit’ investment, though TechCrunch has learned that the size of the round is €1.1m (~$1.46m).
The new capital will be used to help the young, Berlin-based startup to develop and market its technology, which promises to increase the speed and efficiency of testing mobile apps.
Fragmentation in the Android ecosystem is potentially a big headache for developers, with a multitude of devices, OS versions and customisations to contend with. Getting an app to run smoothly across various configurations is both costly and time consuming, requiring many hours of manual testing as part of the QA process — presuming, of course, that you have access to each and every Android device and OS version being targeted.
That’s the problem that TestObject is setting out to solve. Its cloud service enables developers to set up automated testing of their apps, remotely, on a range of supported Android-based smartphones and tablets. They simply upload their app, record a test by interacting with it as a user would, and the system tracks this interaction and uses it as the basis to create a script which automates carrying out the same test across multiple devices hosted in the cloud. After the test, TestObject delivers a detailed report with the results, while the service is billed based on minutes used and on the number of tested devices.
Competitor-wise, Bitbar’s Testdroid seems the closest. There’s also Germany’s testCloud, which takes a slightly different approach to multi-device testing by employing the crowd instead of automation. Similarly, U.S.-based uTest also takes a manual approach with its crowd of 60,000 ‘professional’ testers, as does Bangalore’s 99tests.