The future of test automation: How Tosca's agentic AI, zero-footprint execution, and API simulation enable modernization at scale

It’s a common idea across the tech industry: AI is fueling a new wave of technological innovation. Test automation is no exception. Over three decades, enterprise QA customers have turned to Tricentis Tosca to transform inefficient testing practices with model-based automation. Now, the company you’ve relied on for scalable, codeless test automation is entering a new era of agentic testing with Tosca’s cloud deployment as its foundation.

With cutting-edge AI features and zero-footprint test execution, Tosca in the cloud addresses the challenges facing QA teams: managing a huge influx of AI-generated code, the rising cost of infrastructure, unavailable systems, and siloed workspaces. The exclusive features included in Tosca’s cloud version, explored below, are designed to help you navigate modern testing bottlenecks and become a leader in the next phase of AI-powered quality engineering.

Tosca in the cloud: AI-based at its core

Cloud has been a growth factor for AI innovation everywhere. Influential LLMs like ChatGPT exist because of cloud’s scalable computing power. The SaaS model inherently provides the necessary infrastructure, economies of scale, and continuous update mechanisms for deploying and scaling AI technologies. It is the same for Tricentis: our AI innovation runs on cloud and is exemplified in two tools included in Tosca’s SaaS deployment — Agentic Test Automation and Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server.

Agentic Test Automation

As software development teams increasingly use AI to generate code, QA teams have struggled to keep up. Not only is there now more to test, but AI-generated code is often more error-prone, forcing quality engineers to test better and test faster.

Agentic Test Automation autonomously generates test cases using natural language prompts, enabling QA teams to increase the speed of testing without sacrificing quality. Agentic Test Automation:

• Cuts manual test creation work by up to 85%, allowing testers to focus on more strategic activities.
• Reduces operational costs by minimizing routine tasks and allowing for better resource allocation.
• Frees engineers to develop new, higher-order skills, like learning to spot hidden AI coding errors.

Available in Tosca’s cloud deployment, Agentic Test Automation enables QA orgs to keep up with modern development teams. It is like a new quality co-worker — one who can perform routine tasks while you focus on the heavier lifts that this new age of AI demands.

MCP Server

AI agents like Microsoft Copilot and SAP Joule are increasingly embedded into everyday applications. This has created a new challenge: what happens when an enterprise wants its disparate AI tools to work together? In the past, merging these technologies would require complex, inflexible, customized integrations.

Tosca’s MCP Server, exclusively available in the cloud version of Tosca, tackles this problem head-on. MCP is a standardized framework that connects your AI models to Tosca without complex or rigid API integrations. It manages AI sprawl, allowing you to coordinate your AI tools in Tosca with ease.

With MCP Server, you can:

• Leverage MCP tools: Gain access to pre-defined actions that your AI models can perform in Tosca, like running and designing test cases.
• Stay in control of your AI: Govern your model’s data and customizations while still using Tosca as your foundation for testing.
• Combine with Agentic Test Automation: Use your own AI model in Tosca to execute and analyze tests while Agentic Test Automation creates them using natural language.

MCP Server exemplifies the forward-looking design of Tosca’s cloud deployment — it is built to solve the next wave of AI-based enterprise challenges.

Test when the systems aren’t available with Tosca

Tricentis API Simulation

Testing APIs is a continual challenge for enterprises. The disparate systems needed to test them are often unavailable, hard to access, or expensive to use. This can lead to testing delays —something QA teams cannot afford as development cycles ramp up. How can companies test their growing catalogue of APIs without prolonging testing schedules and increasing risk?

The answer — simulate the dependent systems and have full control of when and how you test them. Tricentis API Simulation, exclusively available in Tosca’s cloud version, virtually simulates complete and realistic test environments, allowing your team to test APIs without delay. Like Agentic Test Automation, Tricentis API Simulation is designed to help your QA team manage the pressure of faster releases and streamline testing.

• Quit waiting: With API Simulation, simulate real test environments with mock APIs and start testing — no need to wait for system access or availability.
• Test the unexpected: Safely test edge cases in simulated environments to see how systems respond in real life.
• Just-in-time testing: Test end-to-end business processes across multiple cloud apps without waiting for all systems to come online.
• Private API testing: Expand test coverage beyond what’s publicly available and securely test private APIs behind a firewall.

Only available in Tosca’s cloud deployment, API Simulation empowers QA teams to make sure integrated applications run smoothly.

Scale testing and lower operational costs

Elastic Execution Grid (E2G)

As enterprises grow and change cycles speed up, companies have had to expand testing across new regions, teams, and applications. But businesses can struggle to scale test execution across diverse platforms. Testing in parallel and across distributed environments can require additional on-premises infrastructure, keeping some QA teams from growing with the business.

With Tosca’s cloud-native execution environment, Elastic Execution Grid (E2G), QA teams can seamlessly scale, and parallel test execution is made easy. Quality organizations can ramp up testing across distributed environments and virtual machines without having to maintain additional infrastructure. E2G benefits include:

• Seamless parallel execution: Using cloud-based scalability, run regression sets and multiple tests in parallel across various platforms and speed up release cycles.
• Zero-footprint execution: Leverage cloud agents for web applications and APIs to fully test in the Tricentis cloud environment — no internal infrastructure required.
• Optimize execution: Use automated load balancing to effectively distribute and run test sets.

The primary benefits of cloud — scalability, elasticity, offloaded infrastructure, and easily shared resources across regions and teams — are foundational to Tricentis E2G, with each capability helping QA teams manage growing test complexity.

Business Flow Designer

When business processes are mapped visually, enterprises better understand their workflows and can recognize when a process is broken or interrupted in practice. However, even when visually charted, QA teams often struggle to map business processes to the correct test cases, resulting in inaccurate flows, additional formatting work for testers, and slower test creation.

With Business Flow Designer in Tosca’s SaaS deployment, companies can visually link business flows and test cases, keeping both in sync and improving the test creation process. Business Flow Designer:

• Provides an intuitive, collaborative way to design tests that validate critical end-to-end business workflows.
• Keeps testing agile and responsive to changing enterprise needs and ensures test cases are accurate and relevant to the business.

Conclusion

Tosca’s latest capabilities are built for a new era of quality engineering, balancing cutting-edge innovation with flexibility, so your company can stay in control as you navigate the future. Agentic Test Automation offers autonomous test creation, MCP Server lets you bring your own AI models to Tosca, and Business Flow Designer syncs business processes and test cases to speed up test creation. With Tricentis E2G allowing your business to scale testing as needed, Tosca in the cloud is the flexible, AI-powered, future-ready solution for modern quality engineering teams.

To see these features in action, request a demo of Tosca today.