Boston-based ProdPerfect, a startup that aims to automate web application testing, will get a new look and feel.
Inspired by the 1986 Challenger disaster and NASA's mission control following the incident, ProdPerfect's co-founder and chief revenue officer Erik Fogg drew parallels to the space program.
"We contrasted this to the Apollo program, where you have the same anxiety and excitement," Fogg said. "The stakes seem much higher, but in some ways, failure is contained. But imagine if a health care application had a major bug right now. It can be a lot more detrimental."
So what's new? The product is the same, but the skin is different. ProdPerfect's user interface for its clients will get an upgrade.
"We want customers to feel good about what they do," Fogg said. "In the past, we didn't have an identity of our product. We realized that that's our mission control."
ProdPerfect uses machine learning to automate QA testing for end-to-end web application testing — a task typically run by test engineers at organizations.
"It's a duty of engineers to make sure software does not fail," Fogg said. "Our duty to mankind is software mission control, and software is not a low-stake industry, as more people depend on it, failure is not an option."
ProdPerfect raised $13 million in Series A funding in December last year. At the time, the company told BostInno that the funds would be used to make ProdPerfect’s application faster and higher-quality.
Fogg said that the Series A helped the company think about the product in a "big way" and was instrumental in the product upgrade.
