THE NEED FOR SPEED
The leading telcos’ software engineering teams needed to increase their velocity. To achieve this they adopted CI/CD. Rapid, incremental releases demanded that they restructure their organization to enable fast iterations. Their cloud team was reorged into an autonomous team including an engineering manager, product owner, DevOps specialist, developers and a testing specialist (moving from centralized to distributed QA). Achieving Continuous Delivery required that they transition from manual testing to automated testing, and the team had to take full ownership of developing automated API, integration, and Selenium tests (now developers contribute to all test types. Not just the unit tests they were always responsible for).
THEY REALIZED THAT THEIR DEVELOPMENT TEAMS ARE SPENDING TOO MUCH TIME DEVELOPING TOO MANY TESTS THAT WE DON’T KNOW IF WE EVEN NEED
The problem with writing too many tests is that it’s a downward spiral. For every unnecessary test they developed, they paid, even more, to maintain and execute it down the road. Their reorg had increased their test development capacity as every developer developed tests during sprints. Now, they had to find a way to stop unnecessary test development before they drowned in tests.
THEY REALIZED THEY NEEDED QUALITY ANALYTICS TO MAKE SURE THEY DEVELOPED ONLY THE RIGHT TESTS
The SeaLights Quality Intelligence Platform gave them cross-stack Test Quality Analytics in real time. Enabling their cloud team to adopt an innovative approach to develop less tests while increasing our test suite effectiveness. Engineering managers gained data-driven analytics to manage their teams’ activity and could ensure that only the minimum set of necessary tests were developed. Helping them achieve higher velocity.
WE DOUBLED OUR TEAM EFFICIENCY AND INCREASED OUR TEST EFFECTIVENESS BY OVER 49%
We achieved in 6 sprints what previously took us 12 sprints, by ensuring that only the right tests were developed.
ADOPTING “LESS TESTS APPROACH” IN SPRINTS
With the SeaLights they got real-time, automated visibility across all their development languages, test frameworks, and teams, integrated seamlessly into their CI/CD. Giving them that data they needed to become data-driven and adopt a “Less Tests Approach”.
- Sprint planning: SeaLights analyzed their test gaps in each stage and lab, enabling them to plan and prioritize testing activities in those areas.
- Sprint execution: developers and managers got real-time feedback that ensured that all of the important sprint code changes were tested and that their regression suite was up to date.
- Sprint retrospective: team, managers, product owner and test specialist got feedback from SeaLights that all the testing gaps had been closed.
ABOUT SEALIGHTS
SeaLights is the #1 Quality Intelligence Platform for Software Development. It helps you increase the velocity of your engineering teams by using cross-stack quality analytics throughout your code activity, tests, and releases. SeaLights discovers Test Quality Analytics to help you get more from tests with a “less tests approach”, utilizes Test Impact Analytics to test smarter, and applies release Quality Analytics to determine your release readiness.