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The situation: Tikit's fast-paced CI/CD pipeline required easy-to-manage test automation. Plus, testing needed to account for their integration with Microsoft Teams, a platform outside their control.
The result: With Rainforest’s no-code approach, developers on the team can quickly create automated tests for new features. Plus, Rainforest tests the Microsoft Teams platform, delivering reliable results.
Rainforest has been very effective in giving us confidence throughout the entire process. We run it every time we release.
Tikit is a conversational ticketing system built for Microsoft Teams in which employees can submit issues in natural language to get real-time support from an AI-powered help bot.
As a Release Engineer for Tikit, Jason is the gatekeeper for product quality — he runs end-to-end tests on every build and ultimately approves (or blocks) them for release to production.
Meanwhile, the Tikit product team moves fast, releasing code through its CI/CD pipeline up to fifteen times per week. As one of only two people on the team running tests and triaging test results, Jason doesn’t have any time to spare for time-consuming test management.
He needs an easy-to-maintain automated testing solution that integrates directly into his team’s release pipeline.
“We needed things to go quicker and be able to work within the CI/CD pipeline we use for Tikit. We needed speed and ease.”
When Tikit launched in early 2021, Rainforest became the obvious choice to provide automated end-to-end testing that’d integrate with the fast-moving Tikit team’s CI/CD pipeline.
Rainforest’s zero-code approach meant the team could ramp its automation efforts up quickly, especially compared to a solution that’d require coding of test scripts.
“When you’re trying to move quickly and adopt an automation framework, the spin-up time can be great. If you don't have the person with the right technical skillset, you need to get that person, get them to know the product, and get them to write the code. So why not leverage those who know the product and how to use it right now, today? …and start making tests the moment you say, ‘Sign me up.’”
Running Tikit within Microsoft Teams presented a particular challenge: the team had no control over the Teams platform, where any performance issues could potentially cause false-positive failed tests. Rainforest’s automatic retries feature, which automatically re-runs any failed test up to # times, could control for any temporary blips in the Teams platform and save Jason from wasting precious time debugging false-positive test results.
“Sometimes Microsoft Teams is just super-slow and has issues we don't have control over. We love your automatic retries feature that gets us around that. We’re not having to review a lot of false positive bugs that really were just momentary lapses in Teams.”
Today, Jason relies heavily on Rainforest to have confidence in code releases, using Rainforest’s CLI to run Tikit’s automated test suite on every release into the QA environment and every merge to master.
“Rainforest has been very effective in giving us confidence throughout the entire process. We run it every time we release. It's every single time.”
Jason loves the benefits that a no-code approach to test automation gives him, particularly given his needs for speed and ease. From his perspective, having to write code to create and maintain automated tests creates too much complexity and overhead.
“I don't want to write code if I don't have to. It's another asset that has to be managed in a repository that involves all these other factors like code check-ins and then merging. I just think that there's baggage that comes along with managing a code base.”
A no-code approach means the people with the best insights into how the product should behave can quickly create automated tests without any technical skills or training on complex testing tools. Indeed, for new features, Jason can ask the developer who wrote the feature or anyone else on the product team to create new test coverage, saving himself even more time.
“It’s so easy for so many people to work on rather than just a subset of people. I wouldn't be able to do this job with my other responsibilities without Rainforest.”
