The last thing I wanted to do was burden my engineering team with more work, and I knew that Waldo would give us what we needed without us having to put too much effort in.
The Challenge
A small team of engineers responsible for their own QA
At Opus, a mobile-based training platform, Jeff Silver, Co-Founder and VP of Engineering, oversees the engineering team that maintains the core functionality and builds new features for customers.
Before December of 2021, with no full-time QA team, the engineers were responsible for using physical devices to manually test all their own code. “We didn't have the visibility we needed to see if features were breaking as we shipped updates to users,” Silver said. “We had quality issues with some bugs getting through to production that probably should have been caught beforehand.”
As a growing company trying to establish its user base, Opus couldn’t afford to have buggy experiences with every release…but they also could not continue to cannibalize engineering time to cover testing.
The Solution
Using testing automation to save time and catch more bugs
Opus needed automated testing that would save its engineers time while catching as many bugs as possible before the code shipped.
While an alternative could be building out an extensive, dedicated manual QA team, the reality was that what Opus was trying to test would be hard to scale through manual processes. This would also have required heavy investment in headcount, plus onboarding time for that new team, two things that Opus would want to avoid while in a growth state.
“We chose Waldo mainly because I had confidence that it would be really easy for us to use.” Silver said. “The last thing I wanted to do was burden my engineering team with more work, and I knew that Waldo would give us what we needed without us having to put too much effort in.”
The Result
Coding with confidence and shipping faster
Opus now runs a set of 8 smoke tests on every PR in Waldo, which review the core flows and interactions in the mobile app before any merges are approved. Waldo now catches issues that would affect users before Opus ships any updates.
“The engineers still do manual QA,” Silver said, “but it's nice to have an automated system in place to make sure that regression cases we can easily account for in Waldo, but forget to do on our manual QA, are getting covered.”
Silver loves working with the team at Waldo. “It’s super easy to get help and give feedback to them,” he said. “They’re very responsive—when I ask for features, they give me a clear timeline on when to expect them, which is terrific.”
The biggest benefit of Waldo is that it allows the team to move quickly while providing safeguards. “And that gives the team the confidence to write more code and ship new features even faster than before,” Silver said.
With Waldo, the Opus engineering team now spends less time on manual QA. The test automation provides extensive coverage for cases that are hard to cover with just manual testing: such as multiple device configurations. “Waldo saves our team a ton of time to help them get back to coding,” Silver said.
The FUTURE
Waldo has helped us ship faster and with more confidence. We've caught bugs that would've gone out to production if we didn't have Waldo in place.
ABOUT THE CUSTOMER
Opus has set out to build for the "deskless" workforce. It is a mobile-first learning platform that delivers chat-based microtraining. Employers create. Managers connect. Employees engage, learn, and grow. Opus is a tech company, but it takes a human-first approach to everything it builds. The company aims to create space for everyone in the new era of work.