Mendix starts reselling MTA

Mendix partners with Menditect to bring automated testing throughout the SDLC

Mendix announced a reseller agreement with Menditect for our product Menditect Test Automation (MTA). According to Mendix “MTA helps organizations identify bugs earlier in development, leading to reduced costs, faster time to market, and increased app quality during the software development lifecycle (SDLC).”

The partnership with Mendix combines the strengths of two organizations. Menditect has developed MTA as a Mendix specific test solution and has gained deep domain knowlegde about test automation and quality of Mendix apps. Mendix delivers their platform to Mendix customers worldwide and provides a global sales and support organization for reselling MTA. Adding test automation with MTA to the Mendix platform provides benefits for all Mendix customers worldwide.

Background information about the partnership

The evolving Mendix ecosystem

Customer demands and Mendix’s capabilities have grown significantly, shifting from small apps to large, business-critical applications and app ecosystems. Developers and partners must update skills and tools accordingly.

Traditionally, emphasis was on quick feature delivery over scalability, quality, and security. However, balancing rapid development with high-quality standards is now essential.

Challenges of scaling Mendix

Rapid release cycles increase the risk of regression errors, slowing large-scale deployments as apps grow more complex.

While early regression errors in a small app can be quickly fixed, larger apps face slower releases and more bugs. Refactoring helps but doesn’t solve long-term issues. Thus, effective complexity and quality management from the start is crucial.

Benefits of (test) automation

Inspired by high-performance DevOps practices, Menditect advocates for automating quality checks to maintain standards as soon as possible in the development process (shift left testing). Automation not only accelerates the release process but also upholds quality, alleviating manual testing burdens.

Test automation primarily functions as process automation, ensuring code performs expectedly (regression testing), encouraging clean, testable code and preventing regression errors.

Test at the right level

Test automation is easiest to setup and maintain for lower-level tests like unit tests rather than expensive end-to-end UI testing. Extending automated tests to component and process testing levels enhances coverage and reduces reliance on end-to-end tests.

Keeping test scripts separate from production code ensures cleanliness and maintainability, fostering scalable apps.

Mendix-specific automation

Mendix applies low-level test automation for platform functionality, which doesn’t need to be retested in apps. However, the complexity of app specific microflows necessitates testing them to prevent regression errors, especially for larger, more complex apps and during team transitions.

Adopting DevOps practices in Mendix should emphasize keeping microflows clean, testable, and automatically tested. This requires a test tool aimed at Mendix developers that integrates with the Mendix way of working.

Menditect’s solution

Menditect developed MTA based on the following principles:

• Ensure ease of use for Mendix developers to allow for fast setup and maintenance of test scripts as an extension of their development work.
• Provide a reusable test frameworks that allow you to extend unit test to component & process level tests.
• Build and maintain test scripts outside production code to keep the code clean.

 MTA is a unique solution

MTA is the only Mendix specific test automation solution available at the market. The focus of Menditect on making test automation easier and faster for Mendix developers leads to a product that is continously improved. We keep on improving the product over time and will continue to add more features.