"It's kind of morbid but I kinda love it", CEO Tai Shi Ling of UI-licious on QA

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

I grew up in Singapore as a second generation immigrant - my parents were from Malaysia.

Since young, I always had a fascination with technology and how it empowers people, so I was very determined to work in technology (as a kid, I imagined myself wearing a lab coat making cool gadgets in a swanky lab). I started learning to code when I was 17, studying computer science and information systems in high school and university. After graduating, I worked at an ad-tech startup as a software engineer, working on everything from backend, to frontend, to customer support. A few years later, I felt that I didn’t want to continue working on products that I don’t feel passionate about, I wanted to work on products that I could see having a positive impact on people. Luckily for me, at that time, Entrepreneur First was just starting to expand their program to Singapore and they offered me an opportunity to join their pioneer Asia cohort, where I met my co-founder, Eugene, and that’s where the journey of UI-licious began.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

UI-licious is a low-code solution for software development teams to automate testing for their web applications across browsers. It is designed to be friendly and accessible to non-programmers, while at the same time flexible enough for programmers to use Javascript to achieve complex uses cases with our tool.

What is the origin story?

Making sure that the User Interface works is one of the biggest pains for me as a developer. When I was working as a software engineer as an employee, I had many late nights waiting for the QA team to complete testing before I can proceed with executing the deployment process. The QA team that I worked with were non-programmers, and tested everything by hand.

Most software teams rely on non-programmers to perform software testing simply because software developers are expensive to hire, and there’s usually more value in putting software developers to focus on building new features and improvements rather than work on automating tests.

These testers could be the business analysts, the sales or marketing team, the project managers, or in larger teams, dedicated software testers. However, manual testing isn’t scalable as the app grows more and more sophisticated. Unlike backend systems, users will demand to use your app on any browser, on any device, and as the number of features grows in the app, the number of paths a user can take to perform an activity within the app grows. So I tried to teach the testers that I worked with to automate their tests.

At first we tried coded tools like Selenium, but it turned out to be too challenging for non-programmers to learn. We then explored a bunch of codeless tools that generated test script using macro-recording, however we found that these tests frequently produced false negatives as they quickly becomes obsolete as soon as there are minor changes to the UI. I felt that there’s a huge opportunity here because there’s a large pool of dedicated manual testers who are keen to transition to test automation but lack tools that are accessible to them and are robust.

UI-licious is created from the desire to create a test automation tool that is accessible to anyone and works reliably on any UI.

The problem with existing tools were that they were not designed to test user journeys, but instead to test the HTML markup of the UI, which made them hard to learn and brittle.

My co-founder and I started to look into the test cases that QAs were already writing in plain English and developed an test engine that interpreted test cases written like a user story that would work on any UI, regardless of what the markup code looks like under the hood. The tool is also designed to allow programmers to use Javascript to accomplish more complex test scenarios. We presented our first prototype at JSConf.Asia in 2016, and received a very enthusiastic response that motivated us to work on developing the product full-time.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

I love working with very passionate QAs in our team, they are the only kind of folks that get delighted finding bugs in a software like they’ve found treasure and go “AHA!”. It’s kind of morbid but I love it.

In today’s world, we are relying more and more on the web to access important services, from banking, filing taxes, to ordering groceries and food delivery since you can’t go out because of the pandemic, so we believe that access to digital services should be a universal right to everyone. At UI-licious, we’re on a mission to make every web and mobile app accessible, starting with automating tests to catch bugs in the software.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

If I weren’t building my startup, I’d probably work on something related to environmental sciences. I think there’s a lot to be lost if global warming progresses at the current rate, like cute animals.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

As a SaaS business, we measure our success in number of subscriptions and annual recurring revenue (ARR), and we have been steadily growing even during the pandemic. Demand has grown significantly because so many retailers are have turned to online sales and are more focused on improving their ecommerce user experience and making sure it is perfect. You’d be surprised how often customers tell us about catching a major defects in checkout flows before release.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

One of our highlights was on-boarding Daimler, the company that makes Mercedes-Benz as a customer. Getting brands that care greatly about the quality of their products and services as customers is a huge validation for us as a quality assurance solution company.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

I care a lot about the environment, so solutions that tackle environment problems at a low cost makes me excited and hopeful about the future. I grew up watching the cartoon Jetsons, and someday hope that we’ll live in a futuristic world where self-driving cars and robot helpers become common.

I’m most worried about social media technology. I think it is a wonderful thing to be able to connect with people no matter how far apart you are, especially in today’s times. But it’s terrifying to see it used as a weapon in various ways, from cyber-bullying to large-scale propaganda. I’m just glad to be born in the 90s where most things in a typical household were still analog. I’m not sure if being born into a connected world is a good thing, when many things said online could be untrue or biased, because at a younger age, I would not have thought about things critically.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

Personally, I hope that by sharing my story, it inspires more young women to pursue a career in science and engineering or to start their own business. I enjoy reading articles about what’s new in programming and technology on HackerNoon.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Take a few business elective courses… you will spend a lot of time looking at financial and legal documents in the future.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

When working from home, separating the areas where I work and where I rest is the biggest improvement I’ve made. It made me more productive at work, and more rested at the end of the day.