Stars, Stripes, and Software: Alex Zap's Journey to ZAPTEST with Alex Chernyak

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Get ready for fireworks as we celebrate Independence Day here in the US with Alex Zapp's inspiring story. If you don't know, Alex is a visionary whose journey reads like a real life adventure novel. He grew up in the harsh climates of Siberia, served in the Israeli Defense Forces and eventually made his way to the US where his dreams really took flight. With the 4th of July coming around here in the US I thought it would make for a great topic and to celebrate American innovation and test automation. So get those sparklers out and welcome back to the show Alex Zapp, the mastermind behind ZAP Tests. Hey, before we get into it, if you're looking to streamline your testing process, why not give Zap Test a try? They're offering an enterprise version of their full featured application. A no risk 6 month proof of concept, completely free of cost. Just visit testskill me forward slash Zaptrial to download your your trial today. Elevate your testing with zero commitment. Check it out and listen up to hear not only an inspiring story, but all the reasons why this offer is a no brainer. Check it out. Hey Alex, welcome back to the Guild.

Excellent. Thank you, Joe. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here today.

Absolutely. And you actually look like an action hero, so this is really fitting. So good to have you back. So I guess before we get into Alex, maybe a little background with you, you know. You know, just start off telling us a little bit more about yourself and then we'll dive in a little deeper.

Thank you, Joe. Yeah, I'm. I was born and raised in Soviet Union in the Ukrainian Jewish family. And part of my dad's family, the distant family were a Jewish dissident that immigrated in 70s to United States. And my dad was an oil executive and he helps. He decided at that time to different alternative path and he went to Siberia to help Soviet to develop oil. But my childhood was. I fell for most of the part as an American kid that left behind. I knew that I was supposed to go to school somewhere in Brooklyn and instead I was walking on the streets in Siberia there in the brutal cold in the Soviet Union the authoritative environment, you know, it wasn't fun but it was very tough childhood.

Basically with people that were suffering the same and when I had a chance all by myself When I was 18 I left Soviet Union. I had a window of opportunity and I took it. And that's basically how my childhood started.

So Alex, I'm just curious to know when you left Soviet Union, I assume was in the 80s or the 70s, was it hard to ghetto? I don't want to get political here, but I know it was a different environment back then. What was that?

Oh yeah, I mean it was pure Soviet Union as it was portrayed pretty much in our American movies back then. It was an iron curtain. It was like a civilized concentration camp for people to live.

Was very poor and very tough for everyone. I mean the reason why I had an opportunity to, to move out, it's in the late 80s garbage show when they started perestroika, they opened the gate for a different group of a few group of people, Jews, Jews, basically the Soviet Jews to go to Israel. And Germans also were able Germans that been captured during World War II. And the families that were developing in the Soviet Union environment as prisoners, they were able to join their families in Germany. So it was very, very challenging decision for me. I mean I was a kid that didn't speak any language but Russian. And back then, imagine you probably remember those days, we're about the same age. I think there were an Internet. My kids think of this era as a Lord of the Rings sort of. Yeah. But there were kids, there were days when we didn't have Internet. All we had is just letters, the paper letters that people write with the cursive and send it in the mail. And the trick was you don't know if it's going to reach you or not. Especially in Soviet Union, anything could happen. Right. And we had no information about how it is on the other side. I guess it's just conversation for a different show. You and I, we're going to do show about it. Yeah. I'll tell you more. Right. But that's why, that's how I was able to live. And yeah, I went to my first stop was in Israel, so.

So why the Israeli Defense Force? I. I'm kind of ignorant. I assume that everyone when they're 18, needs to join the Israeli army. I don't know if that's true or not. Is this part of what you had to do to become a citizen of Israel to, to go to Israel? Or is that something you did voluntarily?

I did voluntarily. I mean I was a judoka. I mean I was a skinny Jewish kid that played piano and dance and act and everybody were taking advantage of me in my class. So I decided to change my destiny And I started to play judo and I became, I used to fight a lot. I was like advanced at that time. By 18, I was pretty advanced martial artist. And as far as a teenager, who can be right? So. But anyway.

When I came by myself, I didn't have parents, so that they told me, you have two choices. You can go to yeshiva, to a religious school, or you can go join army. I said, of course, army. I mean, if I gonna join army, I. I've been raised being a. A plus achiever, sort of. And I said, if I'm gonna do army, it's going to be combat forces, it's going to be special forces. So only so. And I was preparing myself before army. I was getting the condition and I went through the survival test and what's not and I discharged as an honor soldier. And that's actually how I why I live in the United States. Because when I discharge, IDF gave me different choices what I want to do after discharge. And I said, I have a distant family in United States. That was my childhood dream to join them. I want to go to United States. So IDF asked US Consulate to give me entry visa and Americans gave me a lifetime visa. So I'm an American citizen because I was a good soldier in Israeli Defense Force.

That's awesome. How long were you in the force for?

3 years. I mean just regular, regular. But this was very interesting. I mean, I love idf. I can talk again. I can talk about it for hours. But I can tell you one thing for whatever is going on in the world. Idf, it's an army that made by parents for their kids. If you have kids and you would think of the army, this is the army. That's IDF it. And this is what it took away for 30 years since.

Wow. Wow, very nice. So why come to the US Then? Seem like you were doing well in Israel. IDF seems like it's perfect for you. Why leave and go to the US at that point?

Well, that was my childhood dream. I mean, I felt I was raised in the thinking of myself as an American kid and I didn't see myself living anywhere but in the United States.

Yeah, so, all right, so you come to the US and then what happens? I'm always fascinating how you got into tech then. Did you learn anything from the IDF that like, oh, maybe technology is the way to go? Or like how like did you learn any lessons from being in the Defense Force that you brought over to the US that you then applied to business that made you go in the direction you went in?

Well, the first of all IDF gave me great lessons of western culture. Imagine I've been growing up in the east.

In the pro communist like authority for Jim where.

There wasn't a fair game.

You could not based on the. There's not such a definition as a fair game. I mean everything was corrupted. You have to be knowing someone that brings someone somewhere a lot of bribery about this and this. You have to be someone.

Somewhere to be somewhere. I mean, I don't know, it sounds jabberish but bottom line in IDF I learned that in order for you to be a leader you have to be advanced soldier. There's no any other way. You cannot become an officer living in outside of the trenches to lead people in the life threatening missions. And that gave me a great charge for rest of my life. So I always in my career I'm looking at myself as a advanced soldier of my business. I have to lead my engineers by being advanced engineer. Makes sense. So that's the greatest lesson of my life.

That is a great lesson for sure. So what led you then to build Zap Test? Because I've known you, I've. You haven't known me or I've known of you for years and years and years. I've seen you like back in the day I think you know at Mercury they used to have conferences and they'd have vendors there and I could have sworn you were there in the early times. You had big parties. So what made you start Zap test so early then?

Absolutely great question. So I was in sales first. I was selling the consumer electronics at the beginning. But.

I, I was thinking of myself as more than that. I wanted to do something corporate oriented. My parents were corporate executives in Soviet Union and I grew up in the family and all the surroundings of the leaders that make decision, decision makers, kind of corporate.

People. And I, I've seen myself in this environment but I have, you see, I play piano and I speak five. I, I can communicate in five languages by now but I have this phonetic disabling. I have a thick accent. It doesn't matter how long I gonna live in the.

I still have a thick Russian accent. And in early days in the sales I wanted to go to corporate sales first. I actually wanted to be technical recruiter in Miami. Nobody was hiring me. I was going to interviews, nobody hiring me. And the one manager came out, he was Cuban, he said listen, I feel sentimental to you. We grew up in the similar environments.

Nobody going to hire you. It's hard to understand you on the phone. If you want to get into Technology become an engineer.

And there was one, I mean the mentor in my life that gave me good advice. He said listen, it was mid-90s, he said Quality assurance industry rising because everybody's starting to afraid of bug 2000. They hiring a lot of test engineers. You might have an opportunity to do get in. And this is how I started. But I was looking at as a business, I wanted to create a business out of it and I wanted to do add value more than just manual testing. And I was starting researching vendors on the market who does test automation. And I came across Mercury Interactive. I started to do research of the leadership and I found that some leading managers I served an army with and I knew that so I contacted them and I started to find out they said okay, welcome back, here's a white paper on Windrunner become the certified and if you qualify we're going to sign you up as an independent consultant partner and we're going to give you opportunities to deliver services. And this is how it all started. But with that I wanted to I have this thing I like to.

Push the.

Normal into new normal and always finding the alternative approaches to the same thing, right. So I looked at the consulting and I incorporated special ops principles that I learned in army in Israel to the software consulting.

Back then. If you remember those days, we used to be called the road warriors. Every Monday and Friday you see a number of lines in the airports of the corporate dressed professional line it up to fly either to customer or from customer to side or from side. Yeah, we're going on the customer side and this is how we used to live. And I designed the delivery process where people could deploy faster, deliver more services in the multitasking way. And it started to work out. But another thing that I also came up with back then, it was a rise of the web technologies, right? So late 90s, beginning of 2000s and on the market at that time Mercury and Rational were two main vendors that were rivals for market leadership. So I said guys, you know what? I'm willing to fly to Israel to sit down with engineers in the lab. And so we remember beginning of 2000s it was a second antifa in Israel where bad guys were blowing buses on the streets and killing a lot of people. So it wasn't safe at all. So and I said you know what, I don't afraid. I mean I'm Israeli soldier, I'll go and I used to fly and work out with engineers in the lab, get the early alpha versions, come back to the customers in the states and try to implement in these functionalities in the process. I'm a big process guy. My forte was two things in the consulting that I love the most. It's trained classes to teach people how to do automation. For me it's more like a performance art. Right. And also design the processes for big corporation like a factory, animation factories. And to complement the process you need to have certain functionality that fits in the process. Not just blindly. We designed it to think that it's going to complement it. Right. So it was case applicable. So I used to deliver services to find out from the customer the first hand what the challenges might be communicated to R D in Israel. And sometimes some functionalities they were proud to say were building with my feedback. And so this is how we build the first wave of Zeppel where advanced consulting firm they used to call us Mercury SWAT team. So every challenging technology, any new things that happen sometime I used to fly to the customer and has a new technology that nobody even implemented yet and and just read the white paper user guide to get myself ready for kickoff meeting, you know, something like that. We had a very interesting times back then. That's how it started.

Yeah, I miss Mercury. So what are those special ops principles? Do you have like a framework or like. Is it just in general what you've learned and you.

First of all it's the people. Any special app keen on the people. If you have people with solid skills, good work ethic and determination and ability to multitask and most important be adaptable to any situation.

And this is the most important thing. I've been carefully selecting my team members, but I have people that work with me for 20 years.

I always say I treat the family as a business and business as a family. So I have people today work for me out of Ukraine for example. And every time I watch and hear of the airstrike I text them right away saying how are you doing? Are you safe? We had a mess in Israel in October and I had Israeli crew that I helped them to move out of Mashavas that were being attacked remotely and we situated them in different corners for Israel and so far and so on makes sense. I'm very much involved in my team. So I have people working for me from all over the world. I got people in Nigeria and Ethiopia, in Armenia and Georgia and Israel, in Turkey, you name it, of course America, we're American company. Right. So those are the main principles and of course always self education. It's a constant race with mastering web. We move into mobile, we master mobile, we move into AI, we're always moving, we always reinvent ourselves. Yep, I love it.

Great principles to live by for sure. So how then did it help you to build Zap Test? I know. So you were consulting, you started to.

Learn more and more.

Did you then build your own technology? Were you built on top of Mercury and then you pulled away. Where did Zap Test the product itself come into play?

Great question. So in 2006 if you remember HP started HP software as a software division being a hardware company and the first acquisition of the company that I did it was Mercury Interactive. It was one of the largest Israeli company acquisition back then they paid like four or five billion dollars for that. But with that Mercury had a as a company had a policy of the small group consultants. So like myself, that's why I've been given opportunity to build a company around myself. They were assigning you had to be two people company at least both certified and that's when they start giving you engagement. So Mercury had ecosystem of maybe over 100 partners like that. We were the only partner that Mercury had that didn't carry the sales quota because we had a different specialty. My add value to the company was my advanced delivery, my advanced models that complemented their pso. So this is why they never pressured me or put any sales quota to resell their software. I didn't know how, I didn't have a salesforce. And when the HP acquired Mercury they said we're giving you limit. I I remember probably 10 companies or so take the biggest vendors like at that time or I see and others if you remember that were big resellers of Mercury products and we're both Atlanta based so this why I remember name. So Mercury turned out to them and said guys you know what? We have a one extra partner that we want to strongly ask you to take because they in the gray area they're not typical, don't follow the rules pretty much they are shadow team. And I flew to Texas to meet up with HP executives to represent my case and what that value we're going to bring to them, they really like it. They said listen that's a crazy but very interesting idea. We're gonna you in. And they got us in. But with that they said you have to carry the quarter now. So I said you know what, I never done it but I used to be in sales in the past so I'll take a challenge. We dusted off our sows that we had for through the services. I called around all the managers that I met and my team delivered services to so guys, we HP partners now, we carry the quota. So please, if you're going to do renewal of Mercury software, do it through us. All right? But in order for you to do that, we want to do extra talking for you. So as a process architect I've seen the gap on the market what tools can deliver at that time. If you remember Adobe started to bring up the Flex and Flash. There were web technologies that were positioned as ActiveX. So Adobe 4, I don't know if now we walked away from that technology. But back then they didn't offer open APIs to anyone. So you could not build any integration. Exactly. So if everybody using DOM based object recognition and you know, object recognition, it's a key and the core functionality of any UI automation technology. If you don't recognize object, your framework going to chuck somewhere and your execution will be worthless. So in order to assure flawless execution, we have to be very creative how we're going to present it to the customers. So I started to work on a new generation algorithm for object recognition. I said, you know what we have to do new normal, we have to build a spider man that can fly across the screens and recognize objects. So and this is how we came up with the Zepp fix. It was add in developed for Quick Test Pro that was given alternative recognition engine to QTP which allows you to switch from the built in DOM based object to zap fix that OCR slash. Back then what it is, it's a computer vision technology. Back then we didn't know that it's called computer vision. It was very early. It's only later computer vision started to determine to be determining itself to be used. Right. So this was a computer vision technology, one of the first of the kind. And I used to call customer and say listen, if you buy Quick Test Pro through me, I'll give you this magic add in for free that you can use with Quick Test Pro. And that's how we started to build a resale business. And we see the success in 2011 in Vienna. I remember we were at the partner conference and I presented a step out at the conference had a full full presentation slot announcing Zepp as a software. Back then it was Zepp technology software. So we switched the cliche from being the services company into the full product company. Yeah, so this is how Zepp started and we started to call it Zap Test. I think believe around 2014 or something like that we started to rebrand.

So it's now completely separate from hp. It's not HP anymore. It's A microfocus. Now it's not microfocus, it is one text I think. So it's now a complete separate product.

Absolutely itself for many years. We disengaged completely from the relationship for HPA around 2014 when we started to call it Zap Test, we rebranded to Zap Test.

Right. So you know, it's. You've been all around for a bit. You really know your stuff. If someone wanted to check out Zap Test, I think I looked at your website. You're even doing, you're always doing something new, you're trying to think outside of the box. I think you have some sort of like new. I think it's like an onboarding initiative. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? I think it's like a six month offering.

Absolutely, yeah. So in the quick what we do, we offer in market ability to do proof of concept for six months at no cost. Basically in the tech, in the, in the simple terms, you start contract with Zap Test and for the first six months you have rights to walk away from the contract without paying us anything. This is how confident we are in our software and the overall solution that between the software and the process that we applied, we can fit in whatever you have. Like if you look at the software the way it is today. We managed to design the hybrid software that allows you to automate any UI agnostic to technology of this ui. So meaning the same framework can apply seamlessly to mobile application, to mainframe application, to SAP or web. No difference at all. Makes sense. We're giving you flexibility to execute one script across multiple platforms at once. So saves you a lot of time for regression testing and time to market. We're giving you opportunity for any manager. One of the main challenges, it's how to adapt new technology to deliver the goals with the personnel that they have. Because a team is an asset. Every manager builds a team around themselves about the company, hiring people, evaluating people, onboarding them, feeding them into the process. It's a whole process and they became part of your team like a family. So you don't want to get rid of anyone. But you have a limited budget, so how would you fit it in? Right. Plus our software allows you to script in many different ways. You don't need to be professional automator you may we offer JavaScript scripting approach or even VBScript if you'd like. But the JavaScript serves very well. A lot of people familiar with that, especially the Ex Selenium guys.

Right. We offering you low code so if you understand the logic and you want to construct it but don't do any scripting, you can use icon driven tree view what's not right. And we also have a copilot for over a year now as a OpenAI started to release the API so we adapted and we use a generative AI to.

Drive through natural language. So the entire automation Today, any novice intern that comes to your company can learn a concept of testing and test automation through the app top. So you basically can prompt it to give me an overview of functional testing and it's going to give you detailed overview like ChatGPT but trained on the zap test trained on the testing and. And it gives you more precise direct answers so it can guide you through conceptual understanding of testing through precise writing the code script per particular object calibration and what's not. So everything is that part of the.

Six month poc Everything, yeah.

So as you start the six months with us, we're giving you full enterprise version unlimited. I just want to review what we offer in general so the software able to complement any process. Another challenge of you as a QA manager, it's how you some QA teams support multiple projects, some projects waterfall, some project is agile. Right. And they diverse schedule delivery. So with us you can do either or you can be very agile. You can automate on the mock ups with the only one on the market that allows you to automate on the pure picture. You can have a hand drawing scan it with Zaptest scanner. It parses on the objects and you can construct script based on your logic based on the use case and create the script. And then you can generate test documentation for backup purposes. You can complement the collaboration of multiple teams a lot of customers schedule and set up where you have subject matter expert that knows what needs to be automated. And you may have automators or maybe vendors that they hire for automation that position in a different country, different time zone scatter around, right? Or maybe they have a security restriction for vendors to use access of the software. So in this case we're offering companies video scenario recording technology. It's a desktop recorder within the Zeptest we have a rec studio that allows you a subject matter expert just to record a video of the manual procedure of of the test case scenario. Right. And pass it on to automator Automator on their own time can watch the video. You can also leave narration audio narration to it as a movie. And they can parse this video into the objects and construct the script without even touching live Application based on the video makes sense. So it complements whatever the delivery schedule you have. You want to be as agile, you want to be as waterfall, you want to be. You can fit and knit any skill set together. And most importantly, you can automate anything. Now, even on the automation side, if I'll dive into technicalities on the UI side, you have multiple options. You can automate using Zoe. It's our ZAP object engine. This is the computer Vision plus AI. We have AI injected not just in the copilot, we also have AI injected in object recognition. In the cases where you need to do more advanced object recognition, you can calibrate it with the AI properties make sense. And you can incorporate WebDriver. We designed a web driver with object repository. WebDriver never had object repository, not that I knew on the market. And this was a big problem because for years Selenium frameworks were very linear, very procedural. Makes sense. Takes a lot of time to build and customize. I mean guys were creative of different component based architectures around that. And we merged our webdriver into the shared object repository with our Zoe. So you can have a dual application. If for example, either you moving from webdriver to Zap, from Selenium to Zap Test or you incorporate in the hybrid model, because you may end up zap test to do number of projects, but you have projects that have been already automated with Selenium. You don't want to retire them. Right. So you can merge it. So that's a beauty. And on the top of everything, even if that's not enough, you can use API automation either as a standalone in the studio because we're giving you unlimited licenses. So.

At the very beginning, you developers can start using ZAP Test for unit testing using the API studios integrated collaborating with the functional test automation on the UI side. Right. And even the functional testers can mix UI and API step in the same script to expedite and or maybe improve validation between the user and the system. Makes sense.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I can tell even more it's not it.

On the top of everything. On the top of everything, you can reuse API script for load testing. We got the load Studio so you don't need to rescript anything. I'm a process guy, I build technology that complements the process and I'm sales guy, so I'm positioning in the way that I'm not leaving any room for rejection. If you have intention to automate, even if you don't have budget right away, we can work.

Yeah. And that six month POC is game changer. Because a lot of people I talk to like they, they work with the company for a few weeks, they get it working on a toy app and then they buy it and they're like, all right, see you later. And they like, then they're stuck with this expensive tool. This is, this is crazy. Full enterprise. All the features you just talked about are part of the six month poc.

Thank you. Yeah, I mean I believe in the sustainable business. I mean I grew up in the blue chip corporate environment. Imagine I was late 20s, I didn't know American life, I didn't know culture much and nothing about the corporate environment. I didn't go to school here, right. So even the writing emails I learned from my American mentors. I've been lucky to be under the wing of the very solid American corporate executives that were teaching me everything. I even became a NFL fan, football fan artificially. I mean I'm one of the few first generation immigrants that love American football as much as I love it. And because I, I was infusing myself into the American culture altogether. Right. So I, based on this practice, I believe in the long term relationship of my customers. I have customers that been with me for 20 years, for all all my zepp life being as a company and to support people and they partner to put their name next to mine. They became from being just managers to the directors of qa, directors of development and the global leaders with us supporting all the initiatives and being there when we had to be and always innovating, always delivering, you know.

And for that we confident enough to offer that much flexibility to our prospects to make a weighted decision that they comfortable with us. Because any automation, it's a long term game. If you started especially UI automation, you better continue it. Otherwise you wasted your investment. Makes sense. And you want to partner with the vendor that A has very advanced technology but B also very reliable, that's not going to go out of business tomorrow. They're not going to get acquired by the investor that will go south. Something going to go wrong, right? We proved our record, we proved ourselves. You've seen me around for 25 years, you know I'm always there. And this is why I personally supervise every opportunity that comes to Zap to make sure that we give in 120% to our customers. You snooze, you lose, right? So.

I feel it more than maybe any other American executive because I'm hybrid American, right? If you will. And for me the sense of presenting myself to my employees to foreign prospects that coming and approaching us. I always say to everyone, guys, despite my accent, we're American company. And the certain things based on our ethics as American nation, on the corporate and the national ethics, we don't do like we don't give you one price and give someone else another price or something like that. We have one price. We, we understand, we made a market research. We understand what market needs, we understand what we're giving you for that. And we're standing to that. So bottom line, I keep, I'm trying to keep American flag high and strong. That's why fourth of July, that's why this day that's very special for me personally.

I love it. You know, I come from a family of immigrants, my grandparents, a lot of my friends families are from Italy as well. And they seem to be more patriotic than people that just grew up here. So could this have happened anywhere else other than the U.S. a lot of times people go out us is bad. But it sounds like it's been very good to what you believe in and how it's helped your company.

I won't stop speaking enough about our country. And.

Only in the United States underdog, corporate underdog like me could made it all by myself, all by my chutzpah and my smarts, you know, and the people that supports me and the people that I was treating as an American executive, even though they're living in different zip codes, different countries and that they work remotely makes sense. But because I always religiously follow the rules of being the due diligence, being responsible and responsive and always set expectation and meet expectation that I set.

I shave every morning for my employees mostly. So every morning they come at a certain time, we have a scheduled meeting and they see me as a leader being always on my full gear. I'm ready to execute.

Love it. All right, Alex, once again, I could talk to you forever. This is really a perfect story for the fourth of July and for the independence of automation and all this things. So thank you so much for sharing your journey. It's really cool stuff. Before we go though, is there one piece of actual advice you want to share with the Guild before we go?

I want all as American leaders remember that.

Everybody in the world looking up to us because we're a leading nation indeed. And we're responsible for keeping our American flag strong and always set an example. And this is my motto in life. I'm an American engineer and American executive. God bless America. Happy 4th.

Thanks again for your automation awesomeness, for links to everything of value we covered in this episode. Head on over to testguild.com a503 and if the show has helped you in any way, why not rate it and review it in itunes? Reviews really help in the rankings of the show and I read each and every one of them. So that's it for this episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. I'm Joe and my mission is to help you succeed with creating end to end full stack Automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers. Hey, thanks again for listening. If you're not already part of our awesome community of 27,000 of the smartest testers, DevOps and automation professionals in the world, we'd love to have you join the fam@testguild.com and if you're in the DevOps automation software testing space base or you're a test tool provider and want to offer real world value that can improve the skills or solve a problem for the Guild community, I'd love to hear from you. Head on over to TestGuild Info and let's make it happen.