Meet Lifesum

Lifesum is a mobile health and nutrition app used by millions of people worldwide to track food, exercise, hydration, and wellness goals. The company is expanding into a more personalized health platform with AI-powered features and tailored guidance.

Manual testing couldn’t keep up with mobile releases

Lifesum has millions of active users, so even small regressions could affect hundreds of thousands of customers. To prevent escapes, the team was limited to two-week sprints, alternating between iOS and Android each week while their manual tester completed hundreds of regression tests. 

Even with two full days of testing, it was estimated that just 50% of workflows were fully tested before the app was submitted to the App Store or Play Store. Many of the most critical workflows were also some of the most challenging to test, for example, performance issues that would only appear for users with years of historical data. 

“QA’s time was really just spent constantly on a treadmill chasing releases.”
—Kieran Patel, Head of Technology

The team had already tried several approaches to automation, including building tests internally and working with an external consultant, but neither produced a sustainable automated test suite that could keep up with Lifesum’s release pace.

“Automation only works if the people building it can actually focus. It’s much better if you have a whole company of very smart people building fast, high-quality automation. That’s why QA Wolf was the first solution that came to mind.” 
—Kieran Patel, Head of Technology

Less time testing, more confidence shipping

“QA Wolf is a core part of our QA strategy and our ability to ship consistently.”
—Kieran Patel, Head of Technology

2+ days of QA cut to 45 minutes

Full regression testing now takes less than one day, with engineers getting feedback within  30-45 minutes. With automated tests running directly from GitHub and reporting results in Slack, engineers can see failures as soon as they occur and fix issues without waiting for manual QA. 

“Our engineers can immediately know that some level of QA is starting. Rather than waiting all day for QA to be available, they’re getting feedback within 30 minutes, reducing context switching and speeding up releases.”
—Kieran Patel, Head of Technology

Doubled iOS release cadence

QA Wolf’s automated testing lets Lifesum release new versions weekly. Product priorities, not QA constraints, now determine what Lifesum ships and when. 

“We’ve been able to ship releases back-to-back—three releases in about three weeks. Before, that would have taken at least six.”
—Kieran Patel, Head of Technology

100% automated coverage of P0 flows

Before QA Wolf, Lifesum’s manual tester spent 2+ days running manual tests to make sure that the critical functionality was working as expected. Today, all those flows have an automated test that runs in CI. 

“Our goal was to automate the things taking the most QA time. With QA Wolf, we’ve hit 100% coverage of these workflows. It’s really built our confidence in releases and opened the door to automating even more high-priority workflows.”
—Kieran Patel, Head of Technology