Automated Testing for Developers

The problem

Writing end-to-end tests is the part of shipping you keep skipping. Not because you don't care — because the cost is real: you write the test, then you maintain it every time the UI moves, and the payoff is deferred and invisible. So the feature ships with unit tests, a manual click-through if there's time, and a quiet hope that the flow still works.

That worked when you shipped weekly. It doesn't when you're merging several times a day, often with AI-assisted code you didn't write line by line.

Why the usual approach falls short

• Scripted E2E tests are a second codebase. Selectors, waits, page objects — all of it drifts, and none of it is the product.
• Coverage never catches up. You can only test what you had time to script, and you never have time.
• Flaky suites train you to ignore them. Once "just re-run it" becomes the reflex, the suite has stopped protecting you.
• AI-generated code makes it worse. Features land faster than anyone writes tests for them — see How to Test AI-Generated Code.

How Manta fits

Point Manta at a URL — a preview deploy, staging, or production — and it explores your app the way a user would: clicking, filling forms, following links, moving through flows. It builds a behavioural model and reports what's broken, each finding with a screenshot and the steps to reproduce it. Nothing to write. Nothing to keep in sync when you rename a component.

When there's a flow you never want to break — "a new user can sign up and reach the dashboard" — you describe it in plain English and Manta turns it into a repeatable check.

It sits on top of your existing tests, not in place of them. Unit and integration tests stay where they are; Manta covers the "does this actually work end to end" layer that's usually thin. The autonomous testing guide lays out how the layers fit.

What your first run looks like

1. Sign up, create a project, paste a staging URL (and a test account's credentials if the app needs login).
2. Start the run and watch it explore — pages discovered climbing, an events feed, bugs appearing as it finds them.
3. When it finishes you have a bug list (with repros) and a navigation map of what it reached.

Full walkthrough: running your first test.

Where it fits with the rest of your testing

Keep your fast tests. Add Manta for the broad end-to-end coverage you were never going to hand-write, plus a few plain-English checks on the flows that matter most. The result is merging with more confidence and no new test suite to own.