FogChain
Dynamic, Integrated App Development and Test Automation

With incessant mobile and digital innovation, enterprises seek cutting edge solutions to build and operate applications at scale with greater speed, efficiency, and at a lower cost. Founded by industry veterans with backgrounds at Apple, Sauce Labs, Dynatrace, New Relic, and DeviceAnywhere; FogChain offers an integrated SaaS platform focused on simplifying web and mobile app development, test automation, and application performance monitoring. In an interview with CIO Applications, FogChain CEO James Cerna and Chief Strategy Officer Patrick Quilter explain how FogChain is capitalizing on the collective expertise of their team to take the right step toward building a high-performance application development, testing, and monitoring platform.

What are the major challenges that you see in software testing and how do you intend to solve them?

Five years ago, CIOs saw the advantage—writing programs for automated testing was more efficient than solely relying on manual testers—and categorically started investing in test automation. Since then, the software industry has witnessed a massive shift, from applications running on desktops to the ones running on mobile devices. And today, developers need to test for additional variables, which is extremely time consuming and expensive to deal with manually. Moreover, it turns out that without the aid of system-driven workflows organisations often find it difficult to adhere to best practices. Although organizations are actively hiring programmers who can compile scripts to test the applications in an automated fashion, the whole process becomes time-consuming, strenuous, and uncertain of delivering the desired result. Another business challenge that firms struggle with is the paradigm shift from core proprietary software to open source solutions. For a company that is not adept at test automation, the task of creating an automation framework can be daunting as it requires people who are well-versed with a multitude of technologies.

Having analyzed these challenges closely, we have come up with integrated dev-ops platform that offers application development, test automation, and performance monitoring as core functionalities that can leverage each other. We bring the industry know-how to combine various technologies into a single platform. We make those technologies function in sync with each other, as well as being open for integration with other popular complimentary tools, so companies can implement our platform with minimal effort for configuration.

Give us insights into your integrated application development and deployment platform.

Built with the latest technologies, our SaaS-based platform can be easily configured and hosted in the cloud or on-premise if the customer requires. Our container-based strategy allows clients to deploy the platform behind their firewall easily and without the need for heavy professional services engagements. Additionally, it is affordable, dynamic, and more importantly, largely reduces the need for dedicated software professionals.

A company using our platform can build applications using any advanced programming language with utmost ease. The resultant apps can be deployed on any platform; be it web, desktop, or mobile (both iOS and Android).

FogChain streamlines testing by automating test case development. The automation framework built into the platform reflects the deep thinking of our team and the best practices that we have cultivated over time. The firm has simplified it so much so that clients need not have coding experts to build automated test cases.

Lastly, the company’s monitoring solution allows developers to performance test the applications before and after Production release. The monitor(s) continuously collect real-time statistics on the functioning of the application, alerting the customer whenever established thresholds are exceeded, helping to minimize user impact resulting from any defect or degradation in the app performance.

Can you explain the test automation process of your solutions? And give us an overview of your services.

Our integrated platform allows clients to build a Continuous Integration (CI)/Continuous Delivery (CD) pipeline. In a standard CI/CD pipeline, once an application is developed, it checks source code into a repository and initiates testing automatically. How does this happen? FogChain provides the interface to create tests while readying them for execution. Versatile and adaptable, our platform can integrate into Jenkins or any other CI/CD server available in the market.

From the services perspective, we have employees working as consultants. Our consultants are at the forefront of all the new development processes and are extensively contributing to the repeatable solutions and best practices as part of our services, all the time. They provide both consulting and implementation services to clients.

Tell us about your recent accomplishments, IP strategy, and the vision for the company’s future.

We have been awarded a patent for our technology, and we expect two more patents for our other products soon. Our patent strategy is led by Charles Berman, an intellectual property attorney with nearly 50 years of experience. Berman guides us to protect our products and ideas. With this support, we are in a better position to focus on innovation.

In addition to the patent strategy, we have a well-defined roadmap for FogChain. In an era where technologies are changing rampantly, we aim to simplify and streamline test automation despite the disruption. As a forward-thinking company, we are developing innovative features in our solution using next generation technologies such as “true AI”, and machine learning, and foresee a big part of these technologies applied to our test case creation strategy.

The word ‘Fog’ in the company name refers to the decentralized way of computing that holds great promises for the industry, and also happens to be our key focus area currently. ‘Chain’ on the other hand refers to blockchain which is a secure ledger that guarantees safe communication between edge devices. Fog and blockchain, the subject of our two patents, are areas where we are investing our resources and time and based on the developments we have made till now, we are proud to be way ahead of the curve.