The Black Tux is a tuxedo and suit rental service for individuals and groups. Their custom-built e-commerce platform handles a mix of sales, rentals, and coordinated party-plannings; as well as online and in-store transactions.
The engineering team at The Black Tux could iterate quickly but QA and testing was the bottleneck. When new features were ready for release, the team had to pause work and manually review a build because the existing suite of Selenium tests would take too long to run and wasn’t maintained.
We’d huddle as a group to test manually so that slowed down the process, and was only as good as the people doing the testing at the time. I was very nervous to make changes to the site. It was a bit of a crapshoot.
—David Thomas, CTO
To support a major front-end migration, budget was allocated for two QA engineers to build and maintain an automated test suite but there were risks in that approach:
If you're gonna hire QA resources, it's as much a function of recruiting and hiring the right people as it is their capacity. They need drive and initiative. We had a lot riding on just one or two people. I was happy to find a service like QA Wolf that could help us sidestep that risk and just get down to business.
—David Thomas, CTO @ The Black Tux
QA Wolf built 150 automated tests and got Black Tux to 80% end-to-end test coverage in three months. As the Black Tux team redesigned and refactored the front end, QA Wolf’s engineers were automatically updating the tests right alongside so that every release was fully tested before reaching production.
Oftentimes we'll make changes without telling QA Wolf and almost always, within a matter of hours, QA Wolf is reaching out to us through our Slack connection. It's nice to know that you guys are gonna stay on top of changes and keep everything current.
—David Thomas, CTO
At Black Tux’s request, we used our parallel testing infrastructure to replicate traffic from triple-digit concurrent users so the team could test their readiness for the seasonal traffic spikes.
We didn't expect that you guys would be able to do that because it wasn’t part of the core platform. But you really stepped up. It was just really valuable to us and a sign of a great partnership that you guys stepped in when we needed it.
—David Thomas, CTO
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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