If you are playing with our open source project or trying out the Coupa Enterprise demo, we are now offering (at least for a limited time) live help. Just click our Live Help link to go to the page. Enterprise demo users can also access the link directly from the news section of your demo instance. If we are around to answer your questions, you’ll see a message that says “Coupa Help is online.”

If not, you can always leave a message, post in our forums or send us an email to noah at coupa dot com. It’s all about being a different kind of enterprise applications company and creating a more continuous dialogue in the Coupa community.

PS. We’re using a widget from Meebo called MeeboMe. They’ve done some really great work on a web-based IM solution.

As Coupa eProcurement Express and Enterprise continue to advance, testing becomes a bigger priority and challenge. Towards the end of my Oracle career, I took on the additional responsibility for 100-person QA team split between the US and India. It gave me a first hand look at the “secrets” of testing enterprise software. Oracle is a complex beast, and the fact that most of the testing was done manually exacerbated the problem. It could take 12 months to QA a single release. I’d like to say that my short tenure with the QA team helped increase their focus on test automation, but it will take a while to tame the beast.

At Coupa, we are trying to do test automation right from the start. We’ve been able to release 3 versions of the open source project since July and so it will be 4 releases within a year with our upcoming Prime-Time release. Part of our strategy is to focus on automating unit tests in addition to the functional tests. Unit tests validate the individual units of source code and created by the developer. The functional tests look more at a flow approach, such as a test where user logs in, does a search, adds an item to his/her shopping cart, checks out. A complete suite of automated tests do both positive and negative testing. We’re not there yet, but the team is making good strides. Fortunately, we can supplement the automation with human testing.

We’re using a package called Selenium, an open source test automation tool. They even have a Firefox extension that allows you to record tests as you walk through the application. Some of the unit tests that we’ve created are included in the open source project and we hope to include the functional tests in the future.

It was fun to see the great write-up the Examiner placed in the Business section on Tuesday. Better still was the fact that they liked the Coupa story so much they sent out a photographer to our offices. Fun stuff!

From left to right - Seggy Umboh, Dave Stephens, David Williams, and, seated, Noah Eisner.

I was happy to release our A-Round funding announcement on Business Wire today. BlueRun, as a leading early stage venture firm, adds fantastic operational insight to the Coupa team. And at the end of the day, it all comes down to people - so I’m just thrilled with the depth of experience our Board brings. This announcement, and BlueRun’s financial support, should provide additional evidence Coupa is gaining momentum in the market.