Companies operating online in strictly regulated sectors, such as US prescriptions startup GoodRx, must innovate at speed while guaranteeing software quality. Bugs and glitches can cost such firms many hundreds of thousands of dollars.
When GoodRx turned to BrowserStack, the result was ongoing software test automation that enabled 10 to 15 releases a day with an appropriate level of quality assurance. Overall testing time was reduced by 90%.
According to GoodRx‘s senior manager of quality engineering, Priyanka Halder, the 200-person company is now able to test deterministically and increase test coverage. This helps prevent mishaps on the P0/P1 pipeline, which always needs to be kept working, with problems quickly fixed.
“[Now] when a P0/P1 feature makes it to production, our pipeline already has those tests ready to be run,” she says.
GoodRx went from no test automation to running 100 concurrent tests in months.
“We rely heavily on parallelisation since we release 10-15 times a day. Without BrowserStack, it would take each person six to seven hours to manually test our pages on multiple browsers. Right now, it takes less than five minutes.
“Today, every feature we release goes through test automation first. We’ve run 2.4 million tests on BrowserStack so far. Even the smallest change is run through different browsers to ensure everything is stable,” Halder says.
GoodRx built a quality assurance (QA) team from ‘go’, including clearly defined processes, that could then be scaled up, helping consumer-focused pharmacies earn revenue from mobile and online sales of prescription drugs.
To achieve these goals, applications must work seamlessly every time, according to Halder.
Previously, quality assurance was reactive, responding to ticketed problems ad hoc, as they arose. This caused bottlenecks and poor quality releases. Now the team can proactively create realistic scenarios, using BrowserStack to test across platforms and browsers as part of an automated, scaleable QA process.
GoodRx now has a solid testing pipeline and has moved testing right into production. ‘Shift Right‘ testing – continuous testing in production – suits its high-velocity, high frequency software development.
New releases pushed directly to production can be “feature flagged”, while internal users can be routed to try the new features before they are released to consumers.
“With this approach, the team is able to mitigate risk by finding new and unexpected usage scenarios, and ship fast,” according to the BrowserStack case study – which can be downloaded in full here.
