Customers Vistar Media

Vistar Media is the home of out-of-home (OOH) advertising, where ad space intersects time and place, shaping the moments of everyday life. At Vistar Media, their mission is clear: to empower marketers to harness the unique power of OOH to engage, inform, and captivate audiences. With their innovative platform hosting the world’s most extensive OOH inventory, they offer scale, data, and expertise to elevate brands’ visibility and impact.

In line with their commitment to quality, Vistar Media embarked on a journey towards a more quality-centric culture, establishing its Quality Assurance (QA) function in 2023. With a growing team, they aimed to refine testing processes and enhance overall test coverage, paving the way for continued innovation and excellence.

Challenge

Vistar Media faced several key challenges in their quality assurance efforts. Firstly, with QA as a relatively new function in the organization and most QA engineers having been with the company for less than a year, the team operated heavily on a learning-as-we-go basis. This newness contributed to their struggle with limited visibility into untested elements on web pages, hindering their ability to fully assess and address potential risks. The engineering teams, well-established in their own right, had primarily focused on unit tests, leaving a significant gap in integration and end-to-end testing. This lack of clarity on what should be tested led to inefficiencies and gaps in coverage.

Moreover, as the organization scaled its team, there was a pressing need to simultaneously build automation capabilities to streamline processes and ensure consistent quality across their platform. These challenges underscored the importance of finding comprehensive solutions to enhance their testing ecosystem and support their overarching goal of delivering exceptional experiences to advertisers and audiences alike.

Solution

Integrating Cypress' UI Coverage into their testing toolkit marked a significant turning point for Vistar Media. Through the utilization of UI Coverage, the team gained invaluable insights into critical testing areas, enabling them to prioritize testing efforts with precision based on data-driven analysis. This transition towards data-driven prioritization not only eliminated guesswork but also yielded considerable time savings and optimized resource allocation.

UI Coverage democratized automated testing by empowering non-technical team members to actively participate, fostering a culture of collaboration and alignment in testing crucial elements. Armed with actionable insights, the QA team effectively liaised with the development team to ensure proper tagging, thereby refining the test creation process. This enhanced collaboration between QA and development streamlined testing procedures, particularly during new page development, and significantly reduced feedback loops by identifying and rectifying issues at an earlier stage.

Prior to implementing UI coverage, it was a known issue that elements weren’t being tagged correctly during development, making test creation difficult and resulting in a lack of established processes. UI coverage has been instrumental in identifying incorrect critical flows and providing the QA team with coverage reports driven by data insights. This has facilitated better collaboration between QA and development teams, streamlining the testing process, particularly during new page development. By emphasizing a culture of quality, UI coverage helps reduce feedback loops, enabling the identification and correction of issues at an earlier stage.

Result

Vistar Media witnessed tangible results within a remarkably short timeframe. Within the first two weeks of implementation, the organization experienced a significant 35% increase in test coverage, marking a pivotal improvement in their quality assurance efforts. This remarkable enhancement not only translated into substantial time savings of approximately 1 to 2 hours per week for each QA team member but also empowered the team to make well-informed decisions regarding areas of improvement.

The tool’s unparalleled visibility into both tested and untested elements played a crucial role in this success, facilitating the establishment of baseline coverage metrics and quarterly targets. Armed with actionable insights provided by UI Coverage, the team embarked on a journey of continuous improvement, leveraging the tool’s intuitive interface to streamline the adoption of new testing strategies. Importantly, UI Coverage’s ability to delineate tested versus untested elements provided invaluable guidance, enabling the team to focus their efforts where they mattered most.

The addition of UI Coverage has provided us with invaluable clarity, offering visibility into previously untested elements on our pages. This reduction in guesswork allows us to focus on critical areas and prioritize testing efforts based on data-driven insights, ultimately saving time and resources. As we continue to build and scale our team, having a tool that identifies gaps in testing is immensely transformative, aiding in our automation efforts.