Since the pandemic began, the acceleration of digital transformation has become well understood as companies of all sizes move to modernize their workflows across application and infrastructure stacks. Given this increased velocity of software adoption, Battery Ventures has spent time thinking about what this means for entrepreneurs and customers, detailing our findings in the State of the OpenCloud 2020 report.

One specific theme of interest to us was the modernization of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Battery Ventures has spent significant time evaluating and investing in the category, including JFrog* for binary repository, Launchable* for test prioritization and Bridgecrew* and Contrast Security* for runtime and security.

As we have progressed our work, we have recognized that there are continued, prominent bottlenecks, including testing and security, which have encumbered the pace of software release cycles. These bottlenecks become more apparent as development cycles shift from waterfall to agile, and workloads are moved from on-prem to cloud, and the personas handling these workflows, quality assurance (QA) and security, operate further away from the code. This has driven a push towards a “shift-left” mentality to handle testing and security earlier on and continuously in the development cycle, with developers taking on increased responsibility.

Testing, in particular, comes in many different flavors across in-house QA; developers; and manual testing services from services / BPO companies such as Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte and others. Per Marketsandmarkets, $50 billion will be spent on application testing services in 2022. Regardless of its form factor, testing is absolutely critical prior to pushing applications into production, which leaves a large opportunity to modernize testing through automation.

To that end, we are excited to announce our investment in Cypress.io*, a JavaScript end-to-end testing framework for anything that runs in a browser. Cypress.io has gained significant developer affinity through its open-source framework, which serves as a replacement for legacy Selenium. While Selenium has widespread adoption among QA personas, it was built with the understanding that components would be separate from the application and tests further from the code, while also being a heavy tool to use. Selenium also offers minimal functionality for the visibility of tests, serving as a black box when something breaks.

Cypress.io’s developer-driven, open-source solution allows users to write tests easily and to watch them execute in real time as web applications are built, while layering on the Cypress Dashboard offering which provides critical features such as parallelization with CI, analytics and reporting to give developers full control and insight into their test suite. With Cypress.io, developers will be able to work across the testing pyramid, from end-to-end testing where they verify that overall software functions are working correctly, to unit and component testing where they can test small, individual pieces of code. With Cypress.io, testing becomes an efficient process, integrated well into the modern SDLC so application release cycles can continue to quicken.

Having spent significant time evaluating and investing in the various domains of the testing landscape, we are thrilled to partner with the Cypress.io team on this next phase of the journey!