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The situation: Cireson's manual QA process was slow and unreliable. Tracking tests on a spreadsheet became cumbersome, and developers spent excessive time on manual testing, delaying releases.
The result: By replacing manual testing with Rainforest's crowd testing solution, Cireson reduced their QA time from weeks to hours. This has resulted in faster releases, fewer bugs, and happier clients.
It used to take us weeks to run these tests. Now, we get results within days, or even hours. It’s a big advantage.
For nearly ten years, Cireson’s Service Management and Asset Management solutions have been empowering users to do more with their Microsoft System Center investment.
As CTO for Cireson, James is in charge of making sure their products ship smoothly. Cireson builds complex, highly customizable products with lots of different functionalities, so there’s always a lot of places where things can go wrong.
In the beginning, Cireson was using a manual, ad-hoc QA process to make sure their products were stable: three or four developers tracked the tests they needed to perform on a spreadsheet. The list of tests kept growing, causing developers to spend hours of their time on QA instead of coding. The product managers would pull all-nighters after each feature release to test for issues. The QA process was taking weeks, and it made predicting releases all but impossible.
James knew he could hire an internal QA team, but the overhead would be high, and building each test would still require lots of developer time. Plus, it would take months or even years to build out a full QA process from scratch.
Cireson was growing quickly. In order to scale, they needed fast, reliable QA, so they could ship bug-free products on time."
"It was getting to the point where we were measuring our QA process in weeks. And then if we found an issue, we would have to start over to fix what was broken. It made predicting product releases impossible. We couldn’t
distribute tests and run them at reliable speeds."
Rainforest gives Cireson’s product teams a faster way to run QA tests.
With Rainforest’s no-code testing solution, Cireson can quickly and easily create tests and distribute them to Rainforest’s global team of testers. Instead of having their developers spend hours of their valuable time testing their software, they let Rainforest’s thousands of testers take care of it.
Because Rainforest’s crowd testers are globally distributed, Cireson can run tests 24/7: they can trigger testing at the end of their work day and consult the results in the morning. And with Rainforest’s hybrid automation/crowd testing, Cireson can combine human testing with automation to get their results much faster than an in-house team would ever have been able to deliver them.
To make the process even more efficient, Cireson is leveraging Rainforest’s APIs to integrate QA testing directly into their pipeline. Once a build is complete, testing is automatically triggered and then reported on to prompt the next step in the release process.
Today, Cireson can ship their products with confidence, knowing hundreds of QA tests have been performed on them prior to release.
"Rainforest allows us to have the best of both worlds: we can get these results without having to hire a huge staff."
Thanks to Rainforest, Cireson saves countless hours of developer time on QA testing. By James’ estimation, their QA process now takes them hours, instead of weeks.
Putting this QA process in place means fewer bugs with each new release, and their clients have noticed the difference. The perception of the quality of their product has dramatically increased over time.
It would have taken Cireson years to reach this level of test coverage without Rainforest, James concludes."
“Without Rainforest, it would have taken us multiple years to put together such a reliable QA process. With Rainforest, it only took us five or six months.”
