Let Axon explore your app

Before Axon writes a single test, it can go and learn your application first. App discovery, sometimes called the crawl, explores your running product the way a careful new tester would: it opens pages, follows links, fills and submits forms, and records what it finds. The result is a map of the real app, not a guess about it, and everything Axon generates afterwards is built on that map.

Two ways to explore

You choose how hands-on to be. In guided exploratory mode you click through the app yourself while Axon watches and records the journeys you walk, which is ideal when there is a specific flow you want captured exactly. In the Axon agent crawl, Axon drives on its own, deciding where to go next from what it observes on each page, and keeps going until it has covered the product. Both produce the same rich map; they differ only in who is steering.

What Axon captures on every page

Discovery is not just a list of URLs. On each page Axon records the facts a test needs to exist:

• A screenshot of the page, exactly as Axon saw it.
• Every interactive element, counted and catalogued.
• The actions available: the clicks, inputs, and navigations that move through the app.
• Forms and their rules: fields, required inputs, and validation, so tests know what is valid.
• A real, uniqueness-checked locator for every element, preferring stable attributes like dedicated test ids.
• The API calls each page makes and its load timing, plus what Axon noticed and the tests worth writing.

A living map, including behind the login

As it explores, Axon connects the pages into journeys, the real paths a user can take from one screen to the next, and keeps them as a living map you can see. Give it credentials for a test account and it explores the areas behind your login too, so the parts of the product that matter most are not left off the map. The pages nobody remembered to document show up here alongside the ones you expected.

Safe by default

You stay in control of risk. Additive actions like filling and submitting forms run by default, because that is how Axon learns the app. Destructive ones, such as deleting records or completing a purchase, only run when you turn on the matching toggle in the crawl setup. Nothing irreversible happens unless you ask for it.

From map to tests

The map is where grounded generation begins. When you describe a test, the page it starts on is a page that exists, the button it clicks is found the way that button is really identified in the markup, and the path it walks is a journey Axon actually observed. The discovered structure is also kept as context Axon can read later, so generation and healing both draw on the same real facts. For how that context works alongside your requirements and documents, see the companion guide on grounding the AI in your real app.

Discovery turns your product from something Axon has to imagine into something it has seen. That is the difference between tests that look right and tests that hold up against the real thing.