Customers Spotahome

Spotahome aims to digitize the entire home rental process, from booking to payment. They employ a Back-end For Front-end (BFF) approach, breaking down their platform into smaller projects managed individually for faster deployment. With a geographically dispersed team of 60 engineers, Spotahome plans to double its size rapidly. Product teams, organized into ‘squads’ dedicated to specific application features, include front- and back-end developers, a QA automation engineer, product manager, tech lead, and a UX specialist.

Challenge

With different teams simultaneously developing end-to-end features across BFFs, comprehensive QA is crucial to ensure a flawless user experience. Spotahome conducts up to 250 deployments weekly, requiring continuous testing to maintain platform reliability. Challenges with their initial Selenium-based tests, such as long test runs that spanned hours, flakiness, low feature coverage, and limited expertise, hindered their ability to scale. These challenges and the need to radically increase the pace of feature delivery meant Spotahome had to find a better option.

Solution

Spotahome transitioned to Cypress for several reasons. Firstly, Cypress seamlessly integrated into their JavaScript-based architecture, tools, and processes, facilitating a smoother transition and minimizing disruption. Additionally, the onboarding process for the development team significantly improved with Cypress, thanks to its user-friendly documentation and resources. Furthermore, the vibrant Cypress community proved invaluable, offering guidance and support to overcome any obstacles encountered during implementation.

Moreover, Cypress’s open-source Test Runner perfectly aligned with Spotahome’s commitment to open-source software, ensuring compatibility and transparency. Additionally, features like load balancing and parallelization enhanced performance, enabling faster test runs and more efficient feedback loops. Cypress Cloud emerged as a comprehensive tool, providing extensive information and detailed insights at a glance, facilitating effective test management. Finally, the live log and snapshots offered by Cypress simplified debugging processes, enhancing overall testing efficiency and effectiveness for Spotahome.

We’d seen lots of mentions on our social channels saying Cypress’ product is really good — and it’s true, the documentation is easy to follow and we could find whatever we needed. There are lots of supportive and helpful people in the community.

Result

After successful testing on an internal app, Cypress integration into the CI pipeline enabled daily testing of production releases. Developers supplemented QA efforts, fostering a culture of testing across squads. Balancing Cypress automation with manual testing ensured comprehensive coverage, with tests completing in no longer than 8 minutes. Centralized results in the Cypress Cloud, coupled with Slack integration, expedited bug identification and resolution.

Cypress now handles Spotahome’s entire UI automation, empowering squads with Dashboard access. The team plans to restructure test data for reusability and flexibility and explore visual test regression. As Spotahome expands into Europe, they anticipate increased activity across squads, necessitating ongoing testing and optimization efforts.

Combining these testing methodologies gives us a pretty good feeling about quality. We feel we have stronger coverage than before.