Episode 1289: Building Better Testing Systems with Adam Sandman

As software becomes more deeply embedded in everyday life, poor quality is no longer just an inconvenience. It can become a serious business risk. In this episode of Sharkpreneur, Seth Greene interviews Adam Sandman, Founder and CEO of Inflectra Corporation, who explains how Inflectra began by solving the problem of manual, spreadsheet-based software testing and has since evolved alongside cloud, mobile, and AI-driven technologies. He also discusses the rising stakes of software quality, the importance of clear requirements, the risks of tool fragmentation, and Inflectra's entry into a new category with AI agent testing. Key Takeaways: → Software quality matters more as technology becomes embedded in daily life. → Inflectra was designed to make testing easier and more accessible. → Testing fails when companies don’t know what their systems should do. → Clear requirements are essential for achieving high-quality outcomes. → AI agents and chatbots pose new testing challenges. Adam Sandman is a visionary entrepreneur and a respected thought leader in the enterprise software industry. As the Founder and CEO of Inflectra Corporation, Adam has dedicated his career to revolutionizing how businesses approach software development, testing, and lifecycle management. Under Adam's leadership, Inflectra has become a global provider of award-winning solutions, including SpiraTest’s powerful test management and Rapise’s flexible automation, as well as SpiraTeam’s end-to-end traceability. He has led Inflectra’s software suite to become a global standard, empowering teams worldwide to deliver high-quality software efficiently and collaboratively. His deep technical expertise, combined with a passion for innovation, has positioned him as a trusted voice in the field, influencing trends and shaping best practices for agile development and quality assurance. Connect With Adam: Website: https://www.inflectra.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/inflectra.tech/ X: https://x.com/inflectra Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inflectra LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/inflectra-corporation/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/inflectracorporation

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Sharkpreneur Podcast with Kevin Harrington and Seth Green. Kevin Harrington is the inventor of the infomercial, one of the original sharks from the hit TV show Shark Tank, and has generated over $5 billion in TV and digital direct response sales. Seth Green is the world's first trusted authority on cutting-edge direct response marketing, a bestselling author, and the only three-time marketer of the year nominee. On the podcast, Kevin and Seth interview sharkpreneurs who share straight talk on what it takes to explode your business.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Forty-nine faces looked to him in triumph. Over the last 12 months, they had each taken turns and promoted his business for a week at a time, driving over $987,342 in revenue. What if you had a network of 50 centers of influence who promoted your business every week for a year? Grab your copy of the number one Amazon bestselling book, The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Business with a Podcast at 33% off the Amazon price by going to ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Again, that website for 33% off the Amazon price is ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Welcome to the Sharkpreneur Podcast. This is Seth Green, your co-host. Today, I have the good fortune to be interviewing Adam Sandman, founder and CEO of Inflectra.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Adam, your suite spans tools like Spyro Plan, Spyro Team, Spyro Test, Repeats, ChronoDesk, Sherwire, and Inflectra.ai and a whole bunch of other things. Thank you so much for joining us.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  Thanks, it's great to be here today, Seth.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  It is great to have you. Let's go back in time. How did you get started?

• 1:37Speaker 02

  So, it was 20 years ago. It was our 20th anniversary this year. I was working in the consulting field and realized that there were not good solutions for consulting firms in particular, but really companies of any size were managing testing. And everyone hated testing. It was all done using spreadsheets and whiteboards and very manual methods. And for some clients, it still is today. Some people are obviously on the AI bandwagon. Others are back in the stone age. It was surprising how many companies were still in the stone age. There were some tools on the market from some of the leading vendors, very expensive, very complicated. Nothing was available, easy to use. So, I launched the company to provide Friday, easy to use solution to manage testing, manage QA, launch it on the internet, you know, use the what was then the nascent platform of Google AdWords for B two B audience.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  Uh, and the rest is sort of history, uh, very much a low touch sales model, self-service. I, and again, for those who may be not as seasoned in the IT industry in the old days, twenty years ago, if you wanted a demo of a product, salesperson came to your office with a, with a laptop and a projector and took you out for lunch and showed you the application and the software costs a hundred K. We thought, well, we could do it for ten K if we take cut out all that unnecessary process, give you a live demo, uh, try it yourself, online sales, super easy.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Well, that is incredible. I'm sure the longer version of that story could probably fill a book somewhere if it hasn't already. So let's talk about, um, you've been doing this for a while. Um, talk a little bit about what's changed over the years.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Um, I mean, the first thing was the company journey. I started as a lifestyle business, partly because I had a young, young family and anyone starting a company has to figure out what stage of their life and the business and how they align. So first eight years lifestyle business, me doing something, most of the work, then we moved into, I would say founder-led professional sales in the sense that we were trying to grow the business, not just lifestyle, but I was doing a lot of the work, a lot of the demos, a lot of the technical lifting, the team was building the product, but I was the primary salesperson. Uh, and then the third epoch, which we're in now, is really professionalizing everything in the company, uh, moving to the point where I have no single point, point of failure in the company. And everything from sales to finance to, to marketing should be done by someone who's that's their core job. And I'm out being the external advocate like, like today.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Uh, and that's sort of the three parts of our journey. The industry, of course, has changed massively in that time period. We've gone from everything being software on premise to the cloud, to mobile technology, and now with AI. Uh, the pace of change is only increasing. Uh, on our product side, how you test software is changing everything from what you're testing. It used to be web, it used to be desktop apps, then it's web apps, then it's mobile, now it's chatbots and AI assistants and agents. Um, but the need for quality hasn't changed. So I would say ironically, in twenty years, the fundamental ICP, the fundamental thing we solve has not changed. The stakes are higher, I think, than ever before. If a car crashes because the self-driving mode didn't work or, uh, in a financial system, let someone move money out of your, your bank account to someone else's or vice versa.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  The stakes are much higher. Software is so much embedded in our society that what was a minor inconvenience twenty years ago could be a life-changing event today.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So let's dive in a little bit deeper. You've built a number of different tools. Can you walk us through the list and what each of them does?

• 4:49Speaker 02

  Sure. And really, it's a platform with three flavors. So the Spira platform is for managing the testing process, quality process, basically quality management, three flavors. Aspire Test is the entry level for those who just want something to manage testing. The team addition is for those who want to manage the entire project lifecycle from soup to nuts. Spira Plan brings in portfolio program risk management for the enterprise buyer. So we basically segment the buyer depending on their need. It's really one piece of software with feature flags. So it's one code base to manage. People start with Spira Test and they graduate or not, depending on their needs. But it lets us integrate with different tools that are already in their tool chain without appearing duplicative. That's an important thing we found is that most enterprise IT organizations have a bunch of stuff already.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  And if you try and do everything, they won't often buy your software because it's duplicative. So Aspire Test sits nicely into your existing tool chain, integrates with your Atlassian suite, your GitHub from Microsoft or your GitLab. And then down the road, people might say, well, I need some of these other tools. Can I start to consolidate? Then you've got an expansion play. Then the other tools bolt on to that. Rapise does your traditional deterministic test automation, web testing, mobile testing, API ERP. And then Shure adds in the ability to test agents and test chatbots and non deterministic systems, which is becoming increasingly a problem because software used to give you the same answer every time you asked the same question. Now it doesn't. How do you test that at a scale? If you're the head of sales and you've got a CRM running in your sales force, a CRM agent in your sales force,

• 6:15Speaker 02

  and it's talking to your customers, you want to make sure that every conversation is our message. Ninety-nine percent is good enough. Customer support agent, same sort of thing going on there. So we're seeing a much bigger, big need here for agent testing. So we've added these add-on products onto Spira to basically extend the reach and really tackle different adjacent audiences and use cases.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  That makes a lot of sense. Who is an ideal client for each of those?

• 6:40Speaker 02

  So the ideal customer for the Spire platform in general would be head of quality, head of engineer, VP of engineering, head of DevOps, head of app dev. It could also be the CIO for a smaller company. For the larger enterprise, it would more be the departmental level. Then for sure, why it's going to be either data scientist, or it could well be someone in the quality engineering discipline, or the risk management discipline, because again, risk is becoming so much more prevalent with AI and repeats for automation. That's fairly and squarely in the automated testing, the QE side of things.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  You mentioned it being duplicative and not trying to avoid duplication of existing tools. When does tool fragmentation and duplication become a business risk?

• 7:25Speaker 02

  I mean, for us, it's always a risk because you always have different departments and shadow IT going out there and buying different things. And the market moves so quickly. You know, if you look around, when we started 20 years ago, Jira was just being born, the same time we were being born. Now it's become a very dominant player. Things like Bugzilla were the primary solution, if you can believe that. Things like Notion have come along. I mean, Jenkins was the number one DevOps tool four years ago, and now it's been replaced pretty much consistently by GitHub and GitLab. And whatever's next is going to do the same thing. So for us, we have to be able to integrate with what's coming next. We have to, where possible, capitalize on things that are changing, take more space from our customers. I think in any industry, if you're not expanding your footprint at a customer, you are ultimately at risk of being replaced

• 8:09Speaker 02

  down the road. So we always see every customer as a start of sale, not an end of sale, once you've acquired someone.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  You mentioned being on top of what's coming next. How do you stay on the cutting edge?

• 8:20Speaker 02

  The difficulty, it's going so fast. I mean, things like TLDR newsletter are really good. I love things like The Economist and Bloomberg for the business level. TLDR is great for technical stuff. I get a lot of emails and podcasts I listen to. I go to conferences and events. I do a lot of travel. So I've always where my customers are going to be, whether that's Amazon Reinvent, or it's going to be an idea where Summit, or it's going to be a testing conference. I'm speaking at many events. Really, you have to keep your ear to the ground, talking to other companies, partners, what are they doing? What are our customers doing? You just have to always be listening to what's going on. And then also, we do work with Gartner quite a bit. We've become a Gartner client, and that helps us get some information from the analyst community as well.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  You talk a lot about, obviously, built on testing. What do you think the biggest mistake businesses make is when it comes to testing?

• 9:09Speaker 02

  The biggest mistake most companies make is they want, they don't understand what their systems do before they try and test them. So they want to jump into, uh, let's, we have got this great testing tool. It promises it can test all my software for me and let's go use that software.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Well, what are you testing? What is it meant to do? Or I don't know, it's written down somewhere. Are you, well, where? And if you're wanting something like an AI agentic testing tool, well, AI needs context, business context. So if you don't understand what your system's supposed to do, if you haven't got good documentation, good requirements, uh, at the outset, it's very hard to have high quality at the end, garbage in, garbage out. So I think the biggest mistake is someone sees a shiny tool that promises this nirvana of quality, but they haven't got their house in order. They don't know what the system's meant to do and then they struggle.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  That makes a lot of sense. You've helped so many companies and so many users. What's the biggest challenge you're facing now?

• 10:01Speaker 02

  I think the biggest challenge we in any company is facing is navigating what I would call category, category phase out. The risk that something like Claude Code or any of the other agentic tools will replace an entire category. Like the entire testing market becomes one person pushing a button on Claude Code. Is that feasible to the question? Uh, and then also I would say the other big challenge, which is less talked about, is probably fragmentation of sovereignty and privacy. We've gone from a world 20 years ago where we were globalizing. And if you were a company launching 20 years ago, like I did, you could sell software anywhere in the world online, pretty much without any hindrance. Now with the EU AI Act, EU GDPR, uh, digital service taxes, data sovereignty requirements,

• 10:43Speaker 02

  we're becoming more fragmented again, uh, and it becomes more complex. And maybe we'll find that Europe's going to, you know, disaggregate from the US. That means that companies like us that are headquartered in the US may have to set up European subsidiaries. I mean, so these challenges of digital sovereignty and de-globalization are running against cloud, against AI. So we have these two countervailing forces, which is going to win. And they're both happening at once in this sort of super cycle we're in. So I think that's what keeps me awake at night is this, you know, they privacy compliance plus AI in the opposite direction. And they're moving in opposite directions against each other.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  How does a business know if they need you?

• 11:21Speaker 02

  When their customers are testing their product. So the old joke is if you're not testing your product and delivering high quality, your customers are. And usually they don't tell you, they just choose something else. So reputation is easy, it's hard to build, easy to lose. So I would say customers that are struggling to deliver quality software, they're getting very high. Customers had low satisfaction scores or high support, you know, inquiry rates. They have a problem. Most companies know about it, they don't, they, they don't want to deal with it. It's expensive to fix those, those companies will come to us because they realize. How can I solve this at the root cause rather than just doubling my support team or, you know, try to put a Band-Aid on it?

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Your passion is obvious. What do you like best about what you're doing?

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Um, it's never, it's, it's never the same every year. It's never the same every week. I love the variety. I love being at this meeting, speaking to people. Uh, I also love the fact that as a bootstrap business, we haven't raised any equity. The control and the freedom to do what we think is right for our customers. So I think that's one of the fun things is compared to a lot of our competitors that have, that are slow moving. I love the fact that we can be nimble, make decisions, reverse course when we need to pivot when we need to. But hold the line and also be counter, counter cyclical if we need to be. If all our competitors are doing one thing, it's private equity is pushing them that way. We could do some things that are a bit different, like everyone's pushing towards cloud. We can go after some of the clients that don't want cloud because of sovereignty reasons. And that's a huge market for us. But yet P is pushing everyone the other way, which is like, okay, you keep pushing, keep doing that.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  So I love the fact that we have this ability to be self-directed by our clients. And not necessarily following the hood.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  What are you most excited about for Inflectra over the next year?

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Uh, definitely the launch of Surewire. I mean, Surewire, we released a few months ago. It's our, the new AI testing tool. It's a blue ocean market, there's white space. Much as we, we love beating competitors, it's always, it is fun to build a category. And we've never done that, honestly. When I launched the company, we were a small, small company, you know, privately funded. We went after a segment that existed. We wanted to be a cheaper, faster version of that segment. But ultimately it wasn't new. Surewire is our first really entry into a new segment where we're defining the category. Which is exciting and more expensive and I wouldn't advise it for a first product launch. That's why it's our third or fourth product. We have more funds to launch it and more, more reach to do that. But I'm excited about building the new category.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  And for our folks watching or listening who want to learn more, where is the best place for us to send them?

• 13:39Speaker 02

  For the company, inflectra.com. If you want to talk to me, LinkedIn, I live on LinkedIn all the time. Adam Sandman, the only two of us on LinkedIn. The other guy is an ophthalmologist, so it's the one who's not the ophthalmologist. I always wear a vest or a waistcoat and a bright shirt. So you'll see me on LinkedIn, usually wearing the same outfit.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  All right. This has been Seth Green for Sharkpreneur with Adam Sandman from Inflectra, I-N-F-L-E-C-T-R-A. Adam, thanks again for joining us.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  Thank you, Seth. It's been a pleasure.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Thanks, everybody, for watching or listening. We will talk to you or see you next time.

• 14:09Speaker 03

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