It has been a month since we open-sourced our product under the Apache-2.0 license. Our intention, as we announced, is to better position Touca, as th

Touca Blog - Becoming an Open-Source Software Company

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2022-06-21 18:30:12

It has been a month since we open-sourced our product under the Apache-2.0 license. Our intention, as we announced, is to better position Touca, as the product and the business, for long-term success. But releasing our source code with a permissive license does not automatically make Touca an open-source software company. This transition will take time and effort to complete. We are committed to making this effort and outline our plans in this post.

Touca provides feedback to software engineers when they write code that could break their software. We help developers to see how their changes affect the behavior and performance of their software, as they write code.

While most teams leverage running unit tests as part of their CI pipeline to verify the basic functionality of their code, they still rely on higher-level testing at a larger scale to gain confidence about new versions of their software. But higher-level tests are slow and inefficient. They are complicated to set up and take too long to run continuously. Historically, most development teams have delegated these tests to QA teams, leading to the status quo:

These implications have substantially increased the feedback cycle of high-level tests, making them prohibitively expensive to incorporate into the developer's inner loop. When the feedback is finally available, it is rarely relevant and meaningful to developers to give them enough confidence about their code changes. But engineering teams need that confidence to stay productive. So, they resort to building in-house regression testing solutions that are costly to maintain and not generic enough to be reusable.