Pie's test agents
Pie’s test agents are the automated testers that open your app, act on it and report what they find.
How the agents see your app
- Mobile: fully vision-based. The agent works from screenshots and infers the state of the app from what it sees, the way a person using the app would.
- Web: hybrid. The agent combines what’s on screen with the page itself.
Because the agents work at the interface, they don’t depend on the code structure behind it. See Supported technologies.
What an agent does in a session
Each agent cycles through four phases.
| Phase | What happens |
|---|---|
| Observe | Captures the current state of the screen to understand the layout and context. |
| Act | Performs interactions such as clicks, typing and gestures, based on what it observed. |
| Analyze | Checks the outcome of the action, and flags regressions or errors. |
| Handoff | Uploads results and screenshots to Pie for review. |
How a session behaves
Each session runs without manual input from you. Once it starts, the agent controls the environment from the first step to the last.
The agents decide their next action from what’s on screen, so two runs of the same test may not follow the same path. They adapt to small changes in the interface or in timing, and they can work through an unexpected pop-up or a layout shift.
Let the agents reach your app
WAF rules, bot protection, CAPTCHAs and rate limits apply to Pie’s agents as they would to any visitor. If your edge answers with a challenge, a 403 or a 429, the run never reaches the feature and can’t tell you anything about your app.
Create a narrow exception for Pie’s egress addresses on the environment you test, and keep every protection on production. Pie gives you the addresses for your environment and confirms them with you during setup. Browser and mobile runs can use different addresses, so never copy a range from another environment or an older document.
For the steps, including Cloudflare, AWS, Google Cloud and Azure setup, see Allow Pie traffic safely and Edge platform configuration. If the login is what fails, check the stored login in Manage credentials.