Testing is the bottleneck in the software development lifecycle. It is estimated that 85% of enterprise software is still tested manually. Manual testing results in long feedback cycles for developers that hinder their productivity. On average, it takes 23 days for software engineers to gain confidence that a given code change has no side-effects.
Existing software test automation solutions are slow and inefficient because they are designed for use by QA engineers who work separately from the development team. There is a disconnect between what these products provide (“Is this version correct?”) and what development teams need to stay productive (“Is this version as well as before?”). To fill this gap, engineering teams resort to building in-house solutions that are costly to maintain and not generic enough to be reusable.
Touca started as an in-house solution at Canon Medical Informatics, out of frustration with long QA testing cycles required for every code change which is a typical policy in software companies building mission-critical systems. Thanks to its fast feedback time, Touca was formally approved as a verification method for engineering teams and replaced a poorly-maintained legacy in-house solution.
We provide near real-time feedback when engineers write code that could break their software. We remotely compare the behavior and performance of new software versions against a previous trusted version and report differences in near real-time to help engineers fix regressions before they become costly. By offloading most of the work to our remote cloud infrastructure, we make using our technology easier and much cheaper than maintaining in-house solutions.
Today, we are announcing that we are open sourcing our technology under the permissive Apache-2.0 license. This change allows software engineers to self-host our technology and make changes to it as they see fit, without ever having to pay us.
We are also changing our business model. We will no longer charge engineering teams monthly licensing fees for self-hosting Touca. Instead, we will focus on improving the security, scaleability, and convenience of our managed cloud solution with built-in enterprise-ready features for engineering teams. We will be changing the pricing model for our cloud solution from per month per user to usage-based subscription.
Most importantly, we are changing our approach. Instead of selling Touca directly to enterprise businesses, we will focus on proving the value of Touca to software engineers to incentivize them to promote it to their colleagues and teams. We are creating a community of software engineers who share our passion for improving developer productivity and would like to help us reduce the time that it takes for software engineers to gain confidence in their day-to-day code changes.
These changes are the results of feedback from existing Touca users, and takeaways from our lost sales deals. We have carefully processed these inputs to make the best decision for the long-term success of Touca, both as a business and as a developer tool. We have thought long and hard about the details of these decisions and will publish our reasonings separately in the next few weeks.
With this announcement, we are kicking off the Touca Launch Week, a week-long series of blog-posts, webinars, social conversations, and live-coding streams, to showcase our technology and celebrate our users and customers. You can learn about all of these events here.
If you like to help, you can do any of the following:
- Give Touca a try.
- Join our Discord. We'd love to meet you and hear your thoughts.
- Give Touca a star on GitHub.
- Follow us on Twitter or on LinkedIn.
- Share this post with fellow software engineers.
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