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The situation: Access Group's daily releases and nightly deployments require constant testing. But full manual regression testing took weeks, creating risks of bugs and poor client experiences.
The result: Rainforest's automated testing gives the Access Group team confidence in the quality of their daily releases. Now all new releases are thoroughly tested before going live, and Rainforest has kept critical bugs from reaching production.
Before, we never had the time to perform more advanced tests, because we were spending so much time looking for basic bugs. Rainforest has changed all of that.
The Access Group is a leading provider of business management software to mid-sized organisations. Their broad range of solutions includes software for hosting, compliance, expense management, digital learning, and more.
As the QA lead for Access Group’s LMS product, Mark Fuller has a busy schedule: his product has new releases at least once a day, with nightly deployments. Those updates need to ship fast, without errors, meaning that Mark’s team needs to test updates daily and catch any major bugs or breaks.
On such a rapid schedule, Mark’s QA team simply didn’t have time to perform full manual regression testing, which could take two to four weeks. But without those tests, each new release risked causing breaks in the system, which would impact their clients’ experience—and damage their reputation.
Mark needed a fast-testing solution that could keep up with their breakneck release schedule and allow him to perform in-depth regression testing daily.
"Sometimes, our release would break something that we would never have thought. Having fundamental things break like that would damage our reputation, and our clients wouldn’t be able to use the platform. We needed a way to deliver the same amount, but without releasing new bugs."
The Access Group uses Rainforest’s automated QA to perform daily testing on each new release.
For Mark, Rainforest stood out because of its ease of use and scalability: creating tests was straightforward and results came back quickly.
Mark and his company decided to take it a step further and fully integrate QA with Rainforest into their development process. Now, when developers work on a new release, they’re responsible for writing a test for it in Rainforest, too.
Mark doesn’t have to worry about a bug slipping through the cracks, because he knows that Rainforest’s automated QA testing will catch it.
"Our process has completely changed, from early development to release. We don’t allow a new release unless it’s passed all of the tests in Rainforest. It’s our safeguard."
Mark estimates that it would take an in-house tester two or three weeks to perform the tests that Rainforest runs in 30 minutes.
Thanks to Rainforest’s automation, he now has the capacity to run daily regression testing before each new release.
And now that Rainforest has regression testing covered, Mark’s team has more time to perform advanced tests, which is improving the quality of their product even more.
Most importantly, the entire Access LMS team feels confident in the quality of the product they’re releasing—every time.
"Rainforest more than pays for itself, because it gives us confidence in what we’re releasing. It’s caught some nasty bugs before they’ve gone live. Without Rainforest, we would have had a real problem."
