Ekam — The Idea and Inspiration

7 years of consulting, more than 20 clients across different domains, sizes, maturity & engineering tastes. We observed, understood & solved their test automation problems by building custom solutions. While every consulting engagement was a new learning & new solution was built — we were solving the same problem of fixing test automation habits.

In 2018 we released Optimus to simplify mobile test automation. Parallel test execution (Fragmentation & Distribution), Inter-App testing (test spanning multiple mobile apps), Local device lab, and super cool dashboard were the highlights.

The idea of Ekam (means one, unity in Sanskrit) is to pack the knowledge gained, over these years by solving real, and complex problems on the ground — into one solution

During our consulting experiences with a variety of clients, we observed a lot of problems & anti-patterns

Problems

1. Lack of direction. Limited skill set in providing the direction
2. Limited tech skills
3. Fear of technology
4. Unable to handle the growing complexity
5. Features are churned fast, test automation is slow and not catching up.
6. The time & cost to build a fast, scalable and sophisticated test automation framework is high
7. Lack of long-term vision. Thinking of problems one would face after 3 months, 6 months, and 9 months of test automation journey.

Anti-Patterns

1. Test automation is a part-time job. If time permits we will do automation
2. We would do automation after the release, now the release is the priority
3. Some devs are free, let's get them to provide coverage
4. I understand test automation is important, but now my priority at the moment.
5. Skewed Dev-QA ratio
6. Engineering discipline (Clean code, DRY, Modularity etc..) compromised for test automation code, after all, it is not going to production

All these gaps and problems are real.

In our consulting engagements, we address them, however, we needed a swift test automation development platform, to produce quality automated tests in less time. This lead to the birth of Ekam.

We are on the mission to lower the technical bar, drastically reduce the learning curve & provide features out of the box, so that you see the benefits from the first hour.

We built Ekam, that is fast, scalable, sophisticated, low-code & unified test automation framework