Software testing has relied on written scripts for most of its history. A tester or automation engineer writes instructions, runs them against an application, and revises them each time the application changes. That model worked when releases were infrequent. It becomes harder to sustain when applications are updated weekly or daily, because each interface change can break a script that previously passed without issue.
The Maintenance Problem That Pushed the Industry Forward
Quality engineering teams have long reported that maintaining test suites demands more effort than building them in the first place. Scripts depend on fixed identifiers, layouts, and workflows. When any of these shift, tests fail for reasons unrelated to actual defects, and engineers spend their time repairing automation rather than evaluating the product.
Gartner said in May 2026 that AI-driven software engineering calls for agentic testing platforms, pointing specifically to the complexity and nondeterministic behavior of modern applications as the reason older approaches fall short.
Everest Group has made a parallel argument, stating that enterprises now require quality engineering that covers model accuracy, hallucination, bias, security and drift, rather than treating these as edge cases layered onto existing frameworks.
The industry response has been to develop software agents capable of generating tests from requirements, executing them, and adjusting when the application under test changes, while people retain decision-making authority over what matters and what gets released.
Harry Rao and the Founding of TestGrid
Harry Rao, Founder and CEO of TestGrid, is among the executives describing this change as structural rather than incremental.
Rao studied computer science and worked as a software engineer and engineering leader at CGI, where he served as Director of Software Engineering, and at The Walt Disney Company, before founding TestGrid in 2015 in Atlanta, Georgia.
He has described enterprise testing in interviews as a discipline historically treated as a checklist of scripts to execute and cases to maintain, and has argued that static tools cannot keep pace as AI enters software delivery at scale.
His stated position is that systems should generate tests from requirements, run them across real devices and browsers, and adapt when the application changes, while human testers retain responsibility for coverage decisions and approval.
A Decade of Development: 2015 to 2026
TestGrid was founded on the premise that testing should be continuous and intelligent, built into the delivery cycle rather than applied at the end of it.
In 2015, that was not how most QA teams operated. Between 2016 and 2021, the company spent several years building low-code automation usable by testers without engineering backgrounds, standing up real-device infrastructure at scale, and constructing enterprise-grade environments capable of meeting security and compliance requirements. These were built as a single unified ecosystem from the outset.
By 2022, the company concentrated resources on infrastructure: expanding device labs, tightening cloud orchestration and improving execution control across simultaneous test runs. In 2023, TestGrid moved into full end-to-end automation, with adoption extending to organisations in numerous countries within that year, drawing on capacity across many real devices and browsers.
Today, the platform is used by enterprises across various countries, covering web, mobile, API, real-device, cross-browser, visual and audio testing. In 2024, the company introduced CoTester, an AI testing agent built to generate tests in natural language, execute them, and adapt when applications change, moving away from the script-maintenance model.
CoTester 2.0 followed in September 2025, which helps deliver up to 80% faster regression cycles and almost a 90% reduction in maintenance and test creation.
By early 2026, TestGrid had entered partnerships with GlobalLogic, a Hitachi Group company, and Capgemini, aimed at embedding AI-driven testing into large multi-system enterprise programs, and had extended CoTester into complex enterprise platforms including ServiceNow, Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Zoho and NetSuite.
Funding and Financial Background
TestGrid was built primarily on a bootstrapped model, prioritising customer revenue and disciplined execution in a market where several competitors had raised significant venture funding. The company took a small seed round in its early years before receiving a multi-million-dollar Pre-Series A investment.
What Changes for Testing Teams
If agents take over test generation and maintenance, the day-to-day work of quality engineers is likely to change. Time spent writing and fixing scripts would shift toward defining coverage, reviewing agent output and judging whether a failure represents a genuine release risk. That requires a different mix of skills, and organisations adopting these tools generally prefer to keep a person in the approval path, since an agent operating without review can introduce errors that are difficult to trace.
The Broader Direction
The question facing quality teams is no longer whether to automate, but how much of the work to delegate to software agents, and under what controls. As enterprise applications grow more complex and release cycles continue to shorten, the answer to that question is likely to shape how quality engineering is staffed, trained, and measured over the next several years.