GXtest Unveiled: The Story Behind a Software Testing Revolution

Celebrating 15 years since Abstracta’s inception, today we dive into the trajectory and future of GXtest. It is the product that propelled the foundation of our company and is marketed by GeneXus in different parts of the world, such as Japan, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Uruguay.

GXtest has been essential in Abstracta’s history. It has been our foundational seed and the first step of countless initiatives that we have undertaken, to collaborate with the advancing of the technology industry.

What exactly is GXtest? It’s a suite of products for automating functional tests, enabling users without formal programming skills to design, automate, and execute functional tests on web and mobile applications developed with GeneXus.

As explained on our website, conventional automation tools use references to elements in the generated code, like HTML attributes in a web application. This means that test scripts must be manually adjusted with each change in the model.

With the first versions of GXtest, the need to make each of these adjustments manually was eliminated: GXtest automatically adjusted to the newly generated code so that they continued to function, enabling ongoing traceability of the tests, as the platform was designed to use references to the model from which the code was generated.

Over time, with our vision of the industry’s need to create higher quality software more agilely and efficiently, this prospered: now it is a platform that allows Unit, Service, and UI testing, integrated into a pipeline. It is integrated into the development environment, controls the necessary data, and allows automated tests to be run throughout the application lifecycle.

Thanks to all these benefits, we have managed to position GXtest as the leading automation tool for testing applications developed with GeneXus. Currently, it is estimated that each month, more than 1.5 million test cases are automatically executed with our product.

With the support of our tool, GeneXus was able to reduce the time invested in designing and maintaining regression tests by more than 50%, as well as migrate existing tests from one version of GeneXus to the next with minimal effort.

Evolution

In 2018, we began the development of its fourth version, which is currently on the market. We achieved a high level of adoption by GeneXus clients in all the countries where they are located: Japan, the USA, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Paraguay, and Uruguay.

GXtest 4 is the first version of the tool that integrates into the GeneXus IDE software itself.

It has an agile and DevOps approach and enables development and testing teams to work complementarily, to create different levels of testing using GeneXus code. Additionally, they can easily generate UI tests by recording user flow on the application with GXtest Recorder.

With this improved version of GXtest, development teams can find errors early and reduce the times of each cycle by running automated tests in their CI/CD pipeline.

It also allows them to easily test different components of their application, from batch processing to user interfaces.

Currently, we are working on the creation of mocks for objects and services, global coverage metrics, and mechanisms for test data initialization, to provide more mechanisms for having more atomic and effective tests.

Discover more about GXtest’s story in our case study!

Tracing the Origins of GXtest

It was 2007 when three young friends studying Computer Science at the University of the Republic of Uruguay spotted a clear need in the industry for software testing. They envisioned an innovative product to streamline the automation of testing in complex applications like those developed with GeneXus.

Federico Toledo, Matías Reina, and Fabián Baptista, with the first Abstracta t-shirt. 10 years later (2018), Sofía Palamarchuk would join as a partner.

“It was a venture into innovation, to work with friends, and to be able to define ourselves how far we wanted to go,” recalled Matías Reina, CEO and co-founder of Abstracta.

Gradually, step by step, the company grew exponentially: it opened offices in Uruguay, Chile, the United States, and the United Kingdom, positioned itself as a global leader in software quality, and managed to have clients and various projects around the world.

“Starting out, while we always thought big, I think we were not able to imagine what we are living now. The idea evolved and so did the dreams. It happens that when we reach our goals, we always set the horizon further away, aiming to take Abstracta, the team, and the region to the highest level,” emphasized Federico Toledo, Chief Quality Officer of Abstracta.

After winning a contest from the Entrepreneurship Fund in 2008, Fabián Baptista, co-founder and today Executive Director of Abstracta, decided to leave his job to dedicate himself full-time to the project. Thus, he began to develop what would be Abstracta’s first product: GXtest.

“Starting and focusing fully was fundamental, it was taking the project seriously and dedicating all my energy to it. However, the USD 2,500 prize wasn’t going to sustain our work for long. Fortunately, my mother supported us and financed us for a period until we managed to obtain one of the first grants from the National Agency for Research and Innovation (ANII) to promote Young Entrepreneurs,” Fabián recalled.

“Later, we managed to present our prototype (the first beta version of the product) at an international GeneXus event, the XVIII International GeneXus Users Meeting. There we were awarded ‘Innovative Product’. At that moment, Nicolas Jodal, the CEO of GeneXus, told us that we had a tremendous product and that motivated us a lot. Later, we signed a partnership contract that gave us an additional 40 thousand dollars in funds to finish developing the product,” Matías recounted.

This article was published when they won an award at the Entrepreneurship Fund

Federico detailed: “After some conversations, we ended up signing a commercial agreement that made it easier for us to fully dedicate ourselves to what we knew (building the product) while GeneXus provided us with its experience and its network of channels for its commercialization and distribution.”

In 2009, Federico traveled to the United States and participated in the GeneXus Meeting in Chicago. It was there that he finalized the first sale of a GXtest license. Thus, GeneXus USA became Abstracta’s first client company.

That way GeneXus began to market GXtest, the engine of Abstracta’s foundation. “Overnight, we started selling all over the world,” exclaimed Federico.

That same year, we inaugurated the first official office in Montevideo, Uruguay, a new and great milestone that would be just the beginning of a one-way journey for our company. We invite you to learn more about the history of Abstracta in this article: Abstracta, the story of a dream.

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