MakersPlace is a Web3, digital art boutique powered by NFT blockchain technology. The platform gives established and emerging creators a place to sell their visual, musical, and experiential art.
As MakersPlace was transitioning from scrappy start-up mode to focus on growth, product quality and reliability became a major priority. The team was moving fast and experimenting with new features, but they lacked comprehensive automated testing to catch bugs and regressions.
Manual testers needed 2–3 weeks to go through the 300 test cases, and the developers were spending up to half a sprint doing QA—time that should have been spent on new features.
Without automated testing to catch bugs during development, the artists and collectors on MakersPlace were finding bugs in production and losing confidence in the platform.
“I’m a big believer in automation — automation at every level. We want unit tests that are continuously running; we want end-to-end tests that run on every deploy to ensure that we get the result we intended; and we want load tests to stress certain scenarios.”
—Sanjay Raghavan, Director of Engineering
While the team had a robust suite of unit and integration tests, they struggled with the complexity of end-to-end testing. For MakersPlace to work, a Chrome extension linked to a crypto wallet is used to place bids, send tokens, and process payments with either credit cards or crypto currencies; then the transactions are recorded on the web app and blockchain. MakersPlace also wanted to be confident that the last three versions of every major browser were supported.
The team needed a partner to help them achieve their test coverage goals without pulling engineering resources off the roadmap or slowing down the deployment process.
QA Wolf had to build out a test framework that would install a browser extension, listen to different interactions to understand that you placed a bid, made a sale, sent a token, etc., and finally, verify the transaction on the blockchain. We needed their technology and expertise to automate that kind of bespoke test.
—Sanjay Raghavan, Director of Engineering
Developers have 40% more time to focus on building
The time they used to spend on QA is now better spent building new features and adding value for the artists and collectors using MakersPlace.
Full regression tests in minutes, not weeks
It used to take manual testers 2–3 weeks to complete a complete regression test, today their test suite runs in a few minutes.
In-house QA can focus on strategic planning
By off-loading the actual testing to QA Wolf, the in-house QA team at MakersPlace can focus on higher-value work.
“The way QA Wolf staffs is new and something I wanted to try. They just have some dedicated folks building tests for us as features land in a staging environment. I’ve been pretty happy with the amount of things that we can cover in this async way. It’s perfect for this distributed, remote work environment.”
—Sanjay Raghavan, Director of Engineering
QA Wolf is a hybrid platform & service that helps software teams ship better software faster by taking QA completely off their plate.
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