Over the past few years, we’ve been doing a lot of talking with (and listening to) store managers and developers (both freelance and agencies). Some of the most common and interesting threads of discussion we’ve had have been around:

• The all-too-common occurrence that a store manager has not realized that their checkout hasn’t been working for days/weeks until a dedicated customer takes the time to reach out to them;
• The number of times individuals were spending maintaining and testing their stores (often with convoluted and inventive ways to test whether or not their checkouts were working); and
• The anxiety often experienced by individuals worrying whether their WooCommerce store would be working the next day or simply whether things were set up correctly.

We wanted to do something to help WooCommerce store owners claw back their time and help relieve them from some of this anxiety. This is where the idea for Robot Ninja was born.

At its core, Robot Ninja is an automated testing service.

We use end-to-end (e2e) testing (sometimes also referred to as browser testing) principles/technologies to test WooCommerce stores to help ensure they are working as expected.

E2e testing is not a new concept and WooCommerce now has some e2e tests baked into core that developers can use and extend upon (this is awesome).

What we hope to bring to the table with Robot Ninja is a service that supplements those tests and gives store owners, developers and agencies some additional features such as the ability to:

• Schedule and/or set up recurring tests on live and/or staging sites;
• Use real products from their store – not dummy products; and
• Use real payments.

But it’s important to stress that this is only the beginning. We’ve got many, many more ideas to explore (and no doubt bugs to fix).

As of today, we’re kicking off our private Beta. If you’re not afraid of a little adventure, don’t mind a few bumps along the way and are interested in helping us test things out please register your interest here. We’re a friendly bunch of developers and look forward hearing your thoughts, ideas and also concerns.

~ The Robot Ninja Team (Brent, Jason & Matt)