Better Test Coverage Without Hiring an Army of Testers

Hiring more QA testers usually stops improving your test coverage faster than people expect. One e-commerce company brought on 25 testers, split between manual and automation, and still sat at 56% coverage. When your bugs are reaching production and coverage is stuck, the reflex is to hire ten more people. Pramin Pradeep, the founder of BotGauge, walked me through why that math rarely works, and what he does instead.

In this episode, I talked with Pramin Pradeep, the founder of BotGauge. He spent more than a decade in test automation, starting as a founding product manager at a startup that grew from zero to $3 million before it got acquired. When AI coding agents made development fast, he noticed QA had quietly become the bottleneck. Companies could build features quickly, but they couldn't release with confidence, so he built agents that handle end-to-end testing.

Here's the trap he described. You hire ten more automation engineers, and you might only gain ten points of coverage, so you hire twenty, then thirty, then forty. Then someone leaves. Pramin saw a company where three Selenium testers walked out and automation stopped cold, because the new hires had to learn the scripts the old team wrote. On top of that, more testers means more managers, and managers for the managers. You spend a lot to move a number that has diminishing returns.

What BotGauge does instead is deploy a set of agents into the customer's system that generate the tests, run them, and maintain them as the product changes. A forward-deployed engineer watches the agents to make sure they're doing the right thing. The results he shared were the part that sounded too good to be true to his customers. A company that spent six to eight months getting to 45% coverage reached over 80% in three weeks, at about 40% lower cost. Another had tried for ten months, and BotGauge did it in 45 days.

I asked him to explain the forward-deployed engineer, since the term gets thrown around a lot now that Anthropic and OpenAI are sending them into companies. In his version, it's a domain specialist who also understands the agents and the customer's problem. They sit close to the action, so when someone wants to change a test, they can ask the right questions and tell whether it's a real fix or an obscure edge case that will never happen again. It reminded me of the internal AI champion I've written about, only pointed at quality assurance.

The stakes show up in checkout bugs. I told him about a well-known kids' clothing brand where signing in and trying to check out with certain items just fails. We've hit it for years, and last time we only got through by checking out as a guest. Nobody there seems to be losing sleep over how many sales that quietly kills. Pramin's point is that a startup fixes that the day it hears about it, but a big company has so many moving parts that a broken checkout can sit there while the team ships the next big feature. Agents can run these flows continuously, like a heartbeat on every path a customer takes, so the break gets caught the moment it happens.

We landed on the jobs question, because it always comes up. Pramin was straight about it. Human dependency in QA is going to drop. But at that e-commerce company, they didn't cut the team. Three people moved onto the BotGauge project to guide and monitor it, and the rest got reallocated to other work that had been waiting. You turn people who click through the same screens all day into domain experts who monitor, adjust, and weigh in with judgment. The company scales, and a growing company usually hires more people over time.

What I respected most is that he turns people away. On a discovery call, BotGauge will tell you that you don't need them yet. If you only release once a month, you don't need the speed. When bugs aren't reaching production, your testing is working and you should keep going. The signal that you're ready is when you're shipping often, you've got real customers, and bugs are reaching production where those customers feel them. At the end of the day, if your developers got fast and your QA didn't, that gap is where the money leaks, and it's worth closing before your customers find it for you.