A 20x increase in engineering capacity has Pequity sitting pretty

Pequity needed to speed up the release cycle and improve quality

When Jeff Auston came in to lead engineering at Pequity,  his goal was to build a test-driven engineering culture and a continuous deployment pipeline that would allow the company to hit their goals. He was looking for a better solution for both speed and quality — and in particular to replace his reliance on manual testing.

Time to get new features to customers is especially important for early stage companies. We should be releasing to production daily.
—Jeff Auston, VP of Engineering

Two factors were limiting Pequity’s release schedule:

First, the team was relying on manual testers to review each release candidate, which could take up to a week depending on the size of the build. When developers finished a build, they would toss it to QA and wait for feedback. But the testers — without a comprehensive test matrix — would focus on the new features before completing a full regression test.

That, in turn, caused the second problem: During the time-consuming QA cycles, untested branches would pile up. Sometimes bugs got reintroduced inadvertently, which wasted precious engineering time.

Not all maintenance is a loss. There's a certain amount of that that's always going to be necessary and healthy. But when you're doing more than necessary it adds up.
—Jeff Auston, VP of Engineering