Customers Vidyard

Vidyard is a leading online video platform based in Kitchener, Ontario, specializing in the creation of online video content, personalized video messages, and tailored digital sales rooms. Sales professionals and go-tomarket teams use Vidyard to enhance connections with prospects, humanize their communications, and create exceptional buyer experiences.

Challenge

Vidyard, a video automation tool for remote salespeople, found a fit in the marketplace and grew quickly. With this high growth, the team required more sophistication from its testing process to ensure that they could maintain a high quality experience for their customers.

There was a Selenium setup in place, but it wasn’t reliable. The test suite was run on a nightly cadence, and reviewed each morning by the Quality Assurance (QA) team. QA put in considerable effort to manually reproduce and log failures—which were often unrelated to genuine bugs. “The team just couldn’t trust it,” says Todd Kemp, Quality Lead at Vidyard. “And because we only had time to run the test suite once per day, bugs could be live in production for a full day before they were caught.”

This fragmented workflow separated the engineers developing Vidyard’s product from the testing process, which was owned by a few QAs with specialized knowledge. If the Vidyard team wanted to deploy code with confidence, they needed a reliable and fast testing solution which would enable the entire development team to own product quality, shifting testing earlier in the development process.

With Cypress, we have more diligence, more contribution from devs, more help to review tests, and more solid tests.

Solution

During his job interview with Vidyard, Todd introduced Cypress. “I’ve seen how easy it is for engineers without a lot of E2E testing experience to pick up Cypress. Cypress offers great features for making sure you have reliable tests which were missing with the previous solution, like automatic waiting,” says Todd.

After joining the Vidyard team, Todd kicked off a POC with Cypress for their most critical user workflows and started hooking it into the deployment process. While implementing Cypress was straightforward, Todd focused on making sure the organization was following modern testing best practices. “Developer Operations (DevOps) got involved and grew it from there,” says Todd.

With Cypress in place, Vidyard experienced significant transformations in their release processes. “We started off with a nightly run of our Cypress tests,” says Todd. In a few months, they scaled up their test automation considerably, first to 20 tests a day, then 300 tests a day, and now 4,000-plus tests daily. The team added Cypress Cloud to their tech stack to improve their release times and frequency with automated tests.

Results

With Cypress, Vidyard has newfound confidence in the quality of its product releases and can deliver innovation faster to its customers.

The whole Vidyard engineering team is now engaged in testing, allowing them to innovate faster, save loads of time, and catch bugs before they hit production. Cypress Cloud saves Vidyard an average of 11 days of run time per month by using parallelization. Their once-stretched QA team can now depend on more of the development department for a lot of their own testing.

With Cypress, we have more diligence, more contribution from devs, more help to review tests, more solid tests. We know that they’re not going to be flaky and we can check on different requests.

There is no doubt in my mind that we made the right decision in choosing Cypress as our testing tool for the browser-based aspects of the Vidyard platform. My advice for someone who is considering switching from Selenium to Cypress would be to forget your hesitations and just do it. Cypress takes the headache out of writing tests, and though it might seem daunting to start again with a new tool, it really is simple to get started and you can be up and running quickly. With Cypress, I always trust our test suite. If there’s failure or flake, it’s fixable—you can figure out exactly what went wrong and continually improve your suite.