Tamr, a leading provider of data mastering solutions, understands that high-quality data is crucial for effective decision-making. Marie Donovan, a seasoned member of Tamr's development team, plays a pivotal role in ensuring the company's products meet the highest quality standards. Marie's focus lies in collaborating with the engineering team to achieve comprehensive test coverage, maintain product stability, and deliver exceptional user experiences.
For Tamr, software quality is paramount. It directly influences customer trust and satisfaction, making it a cornerstone of the company's success. Recognizing this, they instill a culture of quality ownership throughout their engineering teams, embedding it into every facet of their build and release processes.
Challenge:
Before adopting mabl, Tamr faced persistent challenges in automating UI testing. The team experimented with both external and internal tools, but encountered recurring issues:
- Time-Consuming Maintenance: Maintaining testing tools and individual tests demanded excessive effort.
- Test Flakiness: Code updates frequently disrupted tests, eroding developer confidence.
- Lack of Reporting: Debugging failures proved difficult due to insufficient reporting and insights.
- Bottlenecks: Manual testing became a release bottleneck, hindering the team's agility.
These challenges underscored the need for a scalable and effective automated testing solution.
Goals in Using mabl:
Tamr approached mabl with clear objectives:
- Enhanced Product Quality: Reduce bugs and deliver exceptional experiences to users.
- Increased Test Coverage: Achieve 100% automated test coverage.
- Reduced Production Bugs: Minimize defects reaching end-users.
- Integrations: Seamlessly integrate with existing tools like Jira and Jenkins.
- Faster Release Cadence: Enable multiple daily releases.
- Developer Access: Empower developers with direct access to mabl.
- Testable UI Code: Avoid UI code modifications for the sake of testing.
Implementation and Benefits:
-
Tamr's journey with mabl began with a proof of concept (POC), during which Marie and another developer built basic test cases for a rapidly evolving new feature. Within weeks, they witnessed mabl's efficacy. Despite code changes, tests remained stable, highlighting mabl's auto-healing capabilities and its ability to adapt to UI modifications.
Emboldened by this success, Tamr expanded its use of mabl, replacing daily manual UI testing with automated mabl tests. This transition empowered the development team to achieve daily software releases. Moreover, mabl's resilience to code changes, coupled with its auto-healing and reporting features, enabled Tamr to shift its focus from test maintenance to creating new tests and catching regressions early in the development cycle.
The tangible impact of mabl on Tamr's testing program is evident:
- Increased Bug Detection: Between November 2022 and January 2023, Tamr's old testing framework found 29 bugs in staging. In the same period a year later, using mabl, they detected 63 bugs.
- Reduced Production Issues: In the four months following mabl's implementation, only one bug slipped into production, revealing an area with missing test coverage.
- Complete Test Coverage: 100% of end-to-end workflows are now covered by mabl tests, eliminating the need for updates.
- Time Savings: Test creation and updates that once took a full day or more now take less than 10 minutes with mabl.
- Cost Savings: Tamr achieved an 80% cost reduction by replacing four full-time automators with mabl.
Conclusion:
Tamr's adoption of mabl has revolutionized its software quality assurance practices. The platform's stability, auto-healing features, and seamless integrations have empowered Tamr to accelerate releases, enhance product quality, and achieve significant cost savings. By embracing mabl, Tamr exemplifies the transformative power of intelligent test automation in today's fast-paced software development landscape.
