First Orion cuts QA cycles 20–25% using Amazon Nova Act AI agents

First Orion, founded in 2008 and now operating with over 300 team members across offices in North Little Rock, Seattle, London, and Dubai, is a branded communications company whose solutions reach hundreds of millions of phone calls across carriers in the US, Canada, UK, and Germany. Their product suite includes INFORM Branded Calling, ENRICH Branded Messaging, AFFIRM Number Monitoring, SENTRY Call Blocking, and PROTECT+ Risk Detection. As they expanded their market reach and shifted to a decentralized, cell-based architecture where each team owns product-specific applications, the scope of QA testing multiplied. Device form factors and browser versions proliferated, and test coverage could not keep pace with development velocity.

Three specific problems crippled the incumbent automation frameworks. First, regression testing was not self-service; developers needed straightforward ways to run tests before shipping to the test environment, but existing test cases carried extensive dependencies that made them fragile and difficult to execute on demand. Second, new features suffered from a test case gap: QA Automation Engineers had to wait until features were deployed to the test environment before they could identify the DOM selectors and labels needed to write tests, forcing QA Analysts to context-switch while waiting and mounting cognitive load as features shipped in rapid succession. Third, the test scripts themselves were brittle; element IDs, CSS classes, and JavaScript attributes changed faster than Automation Engineers could fix them, making traditional Selenium and Playwright automation incapable of keeping pace with release cycles.

When Amazon's account team introduced First Orion to Amazon Nova Act in March 2025, First Orion became a pre-release adopter. Instead of writing code describing how to navigate a UI, Nova Act lets QA Analysts describe what to test in plain English—for example, "Log into the portal, navigate to billing, and verify the invoice total"—and the agent reasons about the current UI state, identifies elements, and runs multi-step sequences autonomously. Unlike Selenium and Playwright, Nova Act does not rely on fixed selectors; it reasons about labels, layout, and context, so a command like "click the Submit button" works regardless of underlying CSS classes. The model adapts to changing page layouts, handles dynamic content, dismisses pop-ups, and recovers from errors without human intervention.

First Orion built an end-to-end system integrating the Nova Act SDK with a React frontend for test case authoring, Amazon S3 for test storage, Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate for orchestration, and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Browser for managed browser provisioning and session recording. QA analysts browse, create, edit, and validate test cases in plain English through the React UI; a custom templating engine handles dynamic variables like phone numbers and email addresses so the same test collection generates unique, realistic data on every run. When a QA analyst triggers a test, the Nova Act Test Runner picks up test cases from S3 and delegates browser operations to AgentCore Browser, which handles MFA without requiring changes to the target application's auth flow. Results flow into an Allure reporting dashboard with Microsoft Teams integration, and AgentCore provides session recording with video replays linked directly in the reports.

The results have been substantial. The turnaround from test case definition to automated execution dropped from days to minutes for supported scenarios—a process that previously required QA Automation Engineers to manually identify DOM selectors, write scripts, debug brittle selectors, and iterate over days. First Orion achieved a 20–25 percent reduction in QA cycles for specific types of testing and estimates saving 25–30 percent of engineering time with Nova Act, decreasing context switches between features. Engineering capacity previously needed to support QA has been redirected to feature engineering and value creation. As coverage expands to additional application modules, First Orion expects further efficiency gains.