The platform that reinvented how we listen to music returned as a streaming service and much more. The new Napster streams music videos and radio, connects artists and fans, and provides APIs for white-labeled services.
In-house QA couldn’t keep up with the release schedule
Napster was migrating their entire platform out of a data center and into the cloud where they would rebuild their content management system from the ground up. The new CMS, which is used by artists, labels, third-party apps, and Napster’s own editorial team is an integral part of the business and the development team needed to release quickly without introducing bugs. Given the rate of change, the in-house QA team struggled to keep up and their engineers would release before new features could be fully tested.
“We had three to five front-end engineers pushing out code at any given time and it was just impossible for QA engineering to keep up. QA became a blocker and things would go out untested. We were introducing too many bugs and needed to find another solution.”
—Brea Gaudioso, Engineering Director
Developers didn’t have time to maintain a test suite
Building a new product from scratch means rapid iteration, which meant that end-to-end tests would be obsolete almost as soon as they were ready. In addition, the developers were under enormous financial pressure to complete the migration. Between all of the competing priorities, building and maintaining a comprehensive test suite wasn’t something the developers could manage.
“It’s a common practice for developers to write functional tests, but when they’re slammed with work it’s not something that they can focus on. Developers are busy, companies are busy, so anything that you can offload is a win — as long as it runs smoothly.
—Brea Gaudioso, Engineering Director
Tests running and bugs reported in less than 30 days
QA Wolf had Napster’s test suite running in less than 30 days and immediately started sending bug reports to Jira for triage and prioritization, including issues with their API layer.
“We save a lot of time because QA Wolf provides so much detail around what has actually failed. Rather than just seeing a red tick and having to figure out what we broke, we get extremely thorough bug reports that pinpoint the issue.”
—Brea Gaudioso, Engineering Director
The capacity of four QA engineers for less than the cost of one
Napster estimates that it would take four QA engineers to build and maintain their test suite in-house, at a cost of $400K/year — and that’s not including the infrastructure needed to run the test suite in parallel.
“We started seeing results in less than a month. QA Wolf seamlessly integrated with our pre-existing workflow without us having to do much at all on our end. It's really easy to implement, and it takes no work on our end.”
—Brea Gaudioso, Engineering Director
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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