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SeaLights Case Study

How a Top Cybersecurity Company Doubled Their Development Velocity with SeaLights Quality Intelligence

Overview

A large cybersecurity company’s top priorities are velocity and quality. The company’s Director of Engineering was tasked with building a team of hundreds of software developers and test automation engineers to quickly develop a high-quality product made up of over 150 microservices. To enable rapid, incremental releases the company’s software department adopted CI/CD, test automation, and a quality culture. 

Even with a quality culture in place, the Director of Engineering started to see production issues. He discovered that these issues were a result of untested code that was getting through to production and concluded that this situation would eventually affect his team’s velocity if he did not deal with it immediately.  The Director understood that he needed more visibility into his team’s testing in order to continue quickly developing high-quality software. 

Once the cybersecurity company began using SeaLights it was able to focus its test development and achieve better results with fewer tests; the development team doubled its velocity and increased team efficiency by 60%.

Doubled
Velocity

Increased Team Efficiency by 60%

The Problem

The QA team was losing control over the quality of its software which was beginning to slow down the development process. A few of the main challenges the team encountered were:

  • Lack of visibility: The team had unit and manual testing in place and began investing heavily in automation but it was still unable to detect where there were coverage gaps 
  • Development of too many unnecessary tests: Because the team couldn’t see the test suite overlay between unit, integration or end-to-end suites they were developing too many repetitive and unnecessary tests that were not improving the product’s quality 
  • Inability to keep up with the speed of development: The team couldn’t test everything on each build and still ship at the rate that it needed to 

The Director of Engineering realized that he needed to reclaim visibility and control over the company’s quality culture or it was going to start negatively impacting development velocity.

Why SeaLights Quality Intellience?

In order to improve the company’s quality, the Director of Engineering knew that his team needed test coverage visibility so they could focus and invest their testing efforts in the right areas. SeaLights Quality Intelligence provided the team with cross-stack Test Quality Analytics in real-time. 

The company uses SeaLights for:

  • Achieving higher quality, with fewer tests: SeaLights provides them with instantaneous visibility so they can identify and focus exactly where they need to invest in test development. 
  • Identifying where to prioritize test development: With SeaLights the team gets real-time insights into their builds that correlate tests with changing code areas and tells them exactly where to prioritize test development. 
  • Sprint planning, execution, and retrospectives
    • Sprint planning: SeaLights analyzes the team’s test gaps in each microservice, enabling them to plan and prioritize testing activities.
    • Sprint execution: Developers and managers receive real-time feedback from SeaLights that all the important code changes in the sprint were tested, and the regression suite is up to date. 
    • Sprint retrospective: The team gets feedback from SeaLights that all testing gaps have been closed, the status of their release readiness and where they will need to focus their test development in the next sprint.

Next Steps

The SeaLights Platform is already integrated into the company’s quality infrastructure and all their scrum teams are using its data-informed insights to increase their test effectiveness. In order to further focus their test development, the company is currently onboarding SeaLights Production Insights which will enable them to prioritize testing based on end-user code execution and eliminate dead code from their microservices

About The Cybersecurity Company

The cybersecurity company develops internet security software.

About SeaLights

SeaLights is the #1 Quality Intelligence Platform for software development. The platform provides managers with actionable data analytics for both manual and automated tests so that they can focus their team’s development and testing cycles and make data-driven decisions about their releases, resulting in fewer incidents in production and a high-quality product. For more information, fill out the form to the right.below.

With SeaLights we know with confidence that we are covering 100% of the code that changes from build to build, and as a result, we have not had any untested code changes in the last 5 months with our legacy app of over 80,000 lines of code.

Ben Goldsmith, Software Engineering Manager, Pokémon