Something I keep hearing from some of the teams evaluating AltTester® is that the process stretches on — two, three, sometimes four months in — and a clear answer still hasn’t emerged. When I ask how it’s going, the responses tend to be slightly vague: the tool seems to work, but they haven’t had a chance to fully explore it yet, or they’re still working through the setup.
That’s understandable. Introducing a new testing tool into an existing workflow takes time, and there’s always something else competing for attention. The problem, however, is not the time itself; it’s that, without structure, the evaluation is unnecessarily delayed in offering a relevant perspective. A proof of concept has one job: to produce a concrete decision. By the end of it, you should be able to say either “yes, we’re moving forward” or “no, this isn’t the right fit right now,” – and in both cases, you should be able to explain why.
This is one of the reasons we extended AltTester®‘s free trial to 30 days. It should allow enough time to run a focused, meaningful evaluation if you go in with a plan. Here’s how to make those 30 days count.
Define what you’re actually trying to prove
Before you write a single test, it helps to agree on what success looks like. Not in general terms, but specifically:
- Which flows matter most to your team?
- What would automating those flows actually save you?
- What level of stability feels realistic for this early stage?
Without that shared picture, evaluations tend to drift. People keep finding new things to explore, new questions to answer, and the trial period passes without a real conclusion.
A good starting question is:
What would AltTester® need to do for us to feel confident moving forward?
For some teams, that might mean: “Can we run tests on real devices as part of our CI pipeline?” For others, it’s speeding up the usual workflow, like: Can we automate the three most critical flows we currently check manually before every release?” Either way, a specific answer is more useful than a general one.”
Write down your needs before you start, and share them with everyone involved.
Keep the scope focused
The goal of a PoC is not to build a complete test suite. It’s to find out whether the tool fits your context: your app, your team, your pipeline. That means picking two or three critical flows, automating them, and observing how the whole thing behaves under realistic conditions.
A focused scope produces more actionable results. It also gives you something concrete to show at the end, which matters when you’re building internal buy-in for a decision.
Use the documentation and reach out early
The AltTester® documentation is your first point of reference. It covers instrumentation, test writing, CI integration, and most of the questions that arise in the early stages of an evaluation. Going through the relevant sections before you start will save time and help you avoid common setup pitfalls.
If stuck on something, reach out to the AltTester® team early. The sooner you do, the more time you have to act on their input. Those conversations often surface things that make the rest of the evaluation much smoother.
Set a realistic deadline and assign an owner
Your free trial gives you 30 days. Treating that as a real working deadline, rather than a soft window, tends to keep things moving. In that time, a focused team can instrument the app, write meaningful tests, run them against a real build, and form a confident view on whether this is worth continuing.
It also helps to have one person on the team accountable for the outcome: not just for running the tests, but for gathering observations along the way and shaping them into a structured assessment — what worked and where the gaps or opportunities are. That doesn’t need to be a formal report; even a concise internal summary gives the team something concrete to build on and a clearer sense of where to go next.
Use the PoC to understand what you actually need
A good PoC doesn’t just tell you whether the tool works. It tells you how you would use it. By the end of the 30-day trial, you should have a much more tangible picture of the practical aspects that matter for your subscription:
- How many people will be implementing tests?
- Do you need more parallel connections for your CI/CD pipeline?
- Would priority support make a meaningful difference to your team’s pace?
Those are the kinds of details that are hard to predict upfront but become obvious once you’ve spent time inside the tool on a real project.
Want a more structured approach? We run guided PoCs
We are aware that not every team has the capacity to coordinate a structured PoC on their own, alongside everything else it is carrying – testing new features or a release that’s coming up, and not enough people to dedicate to it.
Everything described so far is how we approach PoCs with our own clients. We’ve run them across game studios, construction tech platforms, mobile apps, and 3D planning tools — projects with different stacks, different team sizes, and very different starting points. In each case, we begin the same way: agree on what we’re trying to prove, write tests for the flows that actually matter, and work through any setup questions together.
- A guided PoC with us typically runs 2 to 4 weeks.
- We start with a short scoping session to understand your app, your team’s experience with test automation, and what a useful outcome looks like for you.
- From there, we work alongside your team: helping instrument the build, reviewing the test plan, and being available when questions come up.
- We close with a demo session where we walk through what we built, and give your team a clear picture of what comes next, including what kind of subscription setup would actually fit your workflow.
Some of those engagements have grown into longer collaborations. Others gave teams a solid enough foundation to continue on their own. Both are genuinely good outcomes.
End with a decision, not a report
The output of a PoC is a decision, supported by what you observed. Your recommendation doesn’t need to be elaborate, but rather something like: based on what we tested, with this team, on this project, here’s what we suggest, and why. That’s what moves things forward, and it’s what gives the whole evaluation its value.
And if 30 days isn’t quite enough to feel fully confident, that’s fine too. AltTester® is available on a monthly subscription with no long-term commitment, so you can keep building at your own pace without pressure to decide before you’re ready. If you’d like to run the PoC together, feel free to reach out.