Coronavirus: Robots to the Rescue

In my previous posts, I’ve outlined the business continuity challenges facing engineering leaders during the Coronavirus. I’ve talked about the pressure to migrate offline revenue online through digital transformation. In this post, I’ll make the case that adding robots to your workforce is the fastest, least riskiest way to innovate your way out of this crisis.

Business Continuity via Robots

I’ve talked to organizations these last several weeks struggling with business continuity from their service providers. As an example, outsourced software testing services. Organizations relying on offshore manual testing services are now finding QA cycles slowing down or grinding to a halt. Why? These service providers are facing their own business continuity challenges, impacting their ability to quickly respond to their clients. If you were ever considering bringing those services back in-house, now would be the time to do it.

Mesmer’s Robotic Process Automation in Development (RPAD) can be used to in-source your testing. You can quickly spin up AI-powered robots to autonomously test your application in the same way a manual tester would test. It’s faster & cheaper than using offshore providers, not to mention less risky. Plus robots don’t need to shelter in place, which means instant business continuity.

Memser can also be used to reduce the risks of the all remote workforce needing access to cloud based infrastructure. Your testers may be struggling to access devices sitting on a device cart somewhere in the office. Mesmer allows teams to jettison on-prem infrastructure for an entirely cloud based mobile device farm. Users gain access to any number of virtual and physical devices across a range of manufacturers and OS versions.

Innovation via Robots

You might be feeling the pressure to deliver new features faster, in a climate where resources are now remote and hiring and onboarding is impractical. Robots can help your team accelerate your innovation. In talking to large enterprises, it’s not uncommon to hear the bottleneck in faster releases is testing. Some organizations still do a feature sprint, followed by a QA sprint. Assuming your sprints are 2 weeks, this means new features will take 4 weeks to release. What if you could do in-sprint testing? New features could then get released every 2 weeks, a 50% improvement.

Robots can work alongside your development team to make in-sprint testing possible. Your team gets fast feedback on product quality, allowing them to iterate and release features quickly.

Automation via Robots

Hiring developers needed to expand features is expensive, not to mention difficult & impractical given COVID. Let’s assume you can find the perfect developer to bring onto the team. It still takes time to hire and then onboard them, time that you don’t have.

I’d like to suggest an alternate approach: make your existing resources more productive, more efficient. Pairing a bot with an engineer significantly improves the productivity of that individual. The bot offloads all manual testing tasks from the engineer (e.g., finding and setting up test mobile devices, creating & executing automated tests, writing detailed bug reports). A top 10 insurance company used Mesmer to increase the efficiency of each engineer by 4x. This insurance company found that a small team of 4 engineers can now do the work of 16 when paired with bots.

If you’re in a pinch and need to act fast, consider expanding your team to include robots. You’ll be better off for it.