Customers Beamery

Beamery reduces manual test suite by 50% with Cypress for their end-to-end and component tests

Beamery is a talent lifecycle management platform that helps global enterprises like Amazon, DocuSign, and VMWare to identify, recruit, develop, retain, and deploy top talent in their organizations. Using Beamery’s AI-powered services, companies can forge meaningful connections with prospective and current talent through talent acquisition, talent management, workforce planning, and skills intelligence.

Challenge

“From Seed through Series A stage we had a ’ship fast, and break things’ kind of attitude,” says Michael Paterson, CTO & Co-founder of Beamery. However, upon reaching Series B, they recognized the need for a more mature and long-term approach to development. “We need to move fast and have the confidence in our test automation suite to not break things,” says Michael.

Beamery’s engineering team relied on a Selenium-based framework, which only a small group of automation engineers could effectively use. As their engineering department expanded from five to 10 teams in 2021, Beamery needed a framework that all engineers could contribute to. With an insufficient number of testers, their QA department accumulated more than 6,000 manual tests in the queue.

“In 2020, our stabilization phase for a major release was 3-4 weeks to complete,” says Kim Hellbom, Engineering Manager at Beamery. “We knew we had to reduce overall testing time and effort while continuing to ensure complete test coverage.” This was an important objective for Beamery engineering: “We wanted to reduce the length of the major release cycle and eventually retire it in favor of independent releases,” says Michael.

Cypress played a key part in being able to increase the automation coverage across our applications.

Kim Hellbom Engineering Manager, Beamery

Solution

Their quest began to find a tool that could empower their entire engineering team to participate in test automation. They wanted a solution capable of handling various types of testing such as UI and component testing, all in one place: “This is important because it means that we can build more organizational experience, accountability, and support across teams,” emphasizes Michael.

Their front-end and quality teams identified their pain points and evaluated three vendors: Cypress, Playwright, and Selenium Webdriver. Their evaluation process was extensive, involving a proof of concept for each vendor to explore their features and performance. Ultimately, they chose Cypress as the most suitable solution to meet their needs.

Results

Cypress rapidly gained traction across the engineering organization at Beamery once they realized how easy it was to deploy and derive value from it. One team abandoned their existing API testing framework in favor of using Cypress for all testing. Another team opted to automate their accessibility tests in Cypress, eliminating the need for a third-party accessibility testing tool. “One of our goals with Cypress was to enable everyone in the team to write automated tests, and we are very happy to see that both backend and frontend engineers are now regularly contributing to their teams’ automation suite,” says Michael.

Beamery’s adoption of Cypress as their testing solution has led to significant enhancements in their testing procedures and the overall efficiency of their release processes.

We reduced the manual regression suite by more than 50%, despite the ever-growing complexities of the SaaS product offering. We consequently shrunk the stabilization phase to a predictable 7-8 days from 3-4 weeks. Cypress played a key part in being able to increase the automation coverage across our applications.

Michael Paterson CTO & Co-founder, Beamery

The Beamery team now executes 215,000 tests per month with Cypress, saving an average of 20 days of run time per month by using parallelization.

With Cypress in place, the whole Beamery engineering team can take ownership over quality. “Engineering teams are incentivized to carve out their own services from the monolithic core platform, enabling independent test automation and releases. Some teams have already done this and implemented full test coverage in their features with Cypress. As a result, test run times have been reduced to 30 minutes, down from a full day of manual testing.”

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Products used

United Kingdom

Growth

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