Hungry SmartBear Acquires Mobile App Test Automation Vendor Bitbar – InApps 2022

Test automation vendor SmartBear, showing an appetite for acquisitions, has done it again by adding mobile app testing tools startup Bitbar.

Bitbar, based in Finland, professes to offer the world’s largest collection of devices for cloud-based app testing, the ability to test in parallel, and being agnostic across native test automation frameworks and popular languages such as Java, Ruby, Python, JavaScript and more. It has a public cloud, a private cloud and on-prem offering.

Anand Sundaram, Smartbear vice president of products, in a blog post, explained that with its acquisition of CrossBrowserTesting (CBT) around three years ago, it provided functional testing customers the ability to test web applications across browsers, versions, operating systems and device types with an on-demand device cloud for live testing and automation.

Large vendors like Mozilla, WeWork, CBS Interactive, and Square have invested heavily in Bitbar, Sundaram said.

A couple of months ago, SmartBear bought the commercial version of Cucumber, an open source project focused on behavior-driven development (BDD). It acquired test-management software Zephyr and HipTest, a collaboration platform for BDD, in 2018.

SmartBear itself was acquired by private equity firm Francisco Partners in 2017.

Naming SmartBear among the leaders in its 2018 Magic Quadrant for Software Test Automation report, Gartner lauded the company for its tools for creating functional tests at the UI layer and the API layer.

ReadyAPI offers functional, performance and security testing capabilities for the API layer. Hiptest adds to BDD support and provides the ability to generate and sync natural language product documentation. The CrossBrowserTesting cloud provides the ability to run Selenium- and Appium-based tests at scale in the cloud, it noted.

It also noted the company’s strong engagement in open source communities.

SmartBear has started to address limitations in automatic test design and test case generation by adding artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, it pointed out.

SmartBear competes with the likes of Tricentis, Eggplant and Parasoft, and fared better in the report than the big players Microsoft, IBM and CA Technologies. In an interesting side note, Bitbar has been providing mobile testing services for IBM.

A few weeks ago SmartBear released TestEngine for automating test execution in continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) environments, and ReadyAPI version 2.8.

TestEngine enables users to automate SoapUI and ReadyAPI tests and execute them concurrently. It can be installed in any cloud or on-premise environment and used with centralized or distributed models.

ReadyAPI 2.8 makes it easier to create data-driven tests in SoapUI and improves integration with Zephyr and Azure DevOps.

Feature image via Pixabay.

InApps is a wholly owned subsidiary of Insight Partners, an investor in the following companies mentioned in this article: Tricentis, WeWork.