In-Sprint Automation Reduces Tech Debt, Saves Costs | STAND 8 | Stand8

Knowing what to do and doing it are two different things. This is often the case with Automation initiatives. The benefits are clear but making the changes? That’s difficult — for many reasons. 

Some companies don’t have the knowledge in-house to make these improvements. They don’t have the budget or the buy-in. Some companies have the budget, but there are sunk costs and other (valid) roadblocks.  

STAND 8 Automation Services partnered with a major financial firm to get a mission-critical project back on track by rolling out large-scale QA Automation. 

The client, who provides a portal for merchants to review payments and disputes, was in the middle of a site re-platform and larger Agile Transformation effort when they fell behind.  

The cause?  

They were using a team of 30 Manual QA testers whose velocity was...less than optimal. The testers were taking longer than the length of a Sprint to complete regression testing. 

Why was the client still using manual testing? 

The managed services company providing testing resources was making more money with manual testers on billing. As such, they had not suggested automated testing and weren’t inclined to do so. 

STAND 8 deployed the people and processes for QA automation and got the re-platform and larger Agile initiative back on track.  

One of the first things to acknowledge on this project was that the client was already behind on a major re-platform effort. Money had already been spent and future revenue depended on delivering the new platform fast. They needed automated testing as quickly as possible.  

There wasn’t time to retrain existing teams and have those teams make the necessary changes. The client needed a team that already knew the tools and process. As such, we supplied a team of 5 SDETS (Software Development Engineers in Test) to automate the testing right away. 

Within 2 months STAND 8’s team had caught up on backlog testing items and was doing in-sprint QA automation for new development features. That’s the speed and power of automation. One month later we reduced our team from 5 SDETs to 2 and taught the developers how to execute and maintain automated tests. 

What happened to the large teams of manual testers? They were trained in automation tools and reassigned to other efforts.  

The whole project took less than 4 months to achieve high ROI (Return on Investment) and prepared the finance giant to modernize other processes. 

Given the stakes at the start of the project, and how far behind the testing efforts had gotten, STAND 8’s contributions were an overwhelming success.  

STAND 8 reduced the execution duration of regression testing from 4 weeks to 4 hours. To further embrace automation, tests were triggered by the CI/CD pipeline at deployment. 

The client was projected to save $390k in the first year compared to manual testing resources and cut QA spending 85% year over year by switching to a developer-executed automation framework. 

To hear more about this project and how STAND 8 Automation can help your organization, contact us at solutions@stand8.io.