Most teams make the transition from manual to automated testing at some point in their lifecycle.
Why?
As features stabilize on a product, it becomes substantially more efficient to test new updates with automation rather than humans. Automation frees teams to work beyond the brutally mundane: unleashing human talent onto higher-value and higher-interest work, improving test coverage and accuracy, cutting overall costs, reducing regression cycle time, while increasing both developer velocity and time-to-market.
This move can be a tremendous hill to climb for any engineering organization. A technology leader must recruit and onboard an automation engineering team, work to develop test cases which hope to cover what’s important, and then set out on the long trek to do that work. Some teams spend years trying to bring a meaningful test automation process to bear.
Ron Taylor, Chief Technology Officer at Studies Weekly, looked to ProdPerfect for a better path. Studies Weekly is a nationally-recognized standards-based curriculum for elementary education which drives student engagement through an innovative combination of printed periodicals and online primary source content. Out of a team of 130 people at Studies Weekly, Ron leads a lean engineering team of 15 people, with 10 engineers and one manual QA tester.
The Move to Automation
Before ProdPerfect, the Studies Weekly team had a manual QA testing process in place and considered hiring a regression QA automation engineer in-house. This would have put Studies Weekly on the long path to automation, starting with the recruiting effort for an excellent engineer.
Ron found ProdPerfect and chose to use it as a full alternative, short-cutting the process to six weeks and bringing full value to bear on day one. With no work for Ron’s team, the E2E test suite appeared, and immediately saved them time, energy, and resources— allowing the team to improve developer velocity and deployment speed with a higher-quality end product in production.
Partnering with ProdPerfect made Ron confident that the path toward automation can not only work—but it can be effortless and deliver faster, more measurable outcomes. “ProdPerfect took the place of hiring a QA team,” said Ron. “Their approach is far more efficient than that of someone new walking in.” Through a light-touch integration of ProdPerfect’s test suite, Ron’s team refocused its resources and effort towards the next priorities in the product, and now spends less time than ever before fixing bugs in production.
According to Ron: “ProdPerfect catches bugs that manual testing would not have been able to. The bugs in production have decreased, and it is measurable. We would absolutely recommend ProdPerfect for anyone in a similar situation.”