Wag! increases test automation and device coverage cost-effectively with BrowserStack

45 mins

current testing time

95%

reduction in testing time

“Deliver high quality and plenty of features to people in record time.”

Jimmy DePetro Senior Director, Head of Engineering & GM of Services, Wag! Group Co.

Home Customer stories Wag!

Industry

Internet commerce, services companies

Location

California, United States

Products

App Live App Automate

Introduction

Wag! is an American pet care company that offers a technology platform to connect pet owners with independent pet professionals for on-demand and scheduled dog walking, training, and other services. Wag! serves pet parents in more than 5,300 cities across the US with over 400,000 caregivers on the platform and continues to expand offerings in the pet health and wellness space.

The QA team at Wag! faced challenges in accelerating new feature releases across their applications and websites. To improve the mobile app and website experience for all customers and deliver new features faster, they decided to automate their testing operations. Using BrowserStack products, they were able to run automated tests across devices and operating systems, ensuring bug-free code delivery within record time. This resulted in saving resources while maintaining the high quality of their software.

The challenge

Test automation to speed up releases

With four mobile applications releasing new features or updates every two weeks and a cluster of web applications that power wagwalking.com, release velocity became the biggest challenge for Wag! Working on multiple features extended the amount of time needed to build and run tests. “As we continually release code and launch new features, we need to ensure that our four mobile apps, websites, core services, and core platform are passing all of our tests,” says Jimmy DePetro, Senior Director, Head of Engineering and GM Associates at Wag!

Device fragmentation added to their woes, as providing all testers with multiple iOS and Android devices available in the market was impossible. This further slowed down the development process.

“Before BrowserStack, we would have a lot of manual QA testers. And whether it was a feature build or release candidate or a production build, every single one of them had to manually install the app on that device, go through and test it. It would take weeks, days, sometimes months for the larger features.”

Jimmy DePetro, Senior Director, Head of Engineering and GM Associates, Wag!

The solution

A cost-effective tool that improves release velocity

The QA team at Wag! decided that test automation could solve their problems by enabling them to streamline the testing and release process and improve stability and scalability across the platform. With BrowserStack App Live, the team performs manual testing on different builds, features, or releases, while App Automate enables them to run automated tests.

Having successfully automated single key events, the team now runs full regression tests twice every day automatically on BrowserStack. And at the time of building a release, the release candidate is sent directly to BrowserStack, where tests are run at the push of a button on real devices, ensuring high release velocity and eliminating the hassle of procuring and maintaining the devices.

Outlining why Wag! chose Browserstack as a partner, Jimmy says, “BrowserStack was the integration of choice for our test automation so that we can run all of our tests simultaneously across multiple devices and multiple builds with an easy to click of a button, bringing down test time from several days to 45 minutes.”

BrowserStack’s unique pricing model was another compelling reason for Wag! to choose it as a partner. Availability of all of the devices for manual and automation testing at all times, and the instantaneous addition of new devices and operating systems at the time of their release ensures that new features and functionalities work seamlessly. This is mission-critical for the team.

“BrowserStack was the integration of choice for our test automation so that we can run all of our tests simultaneously across multiple devices and multiple builds with a click of a button, bringing down test time from several days to 45 minutes.”

Jimmy DePetro, Senior Director, Head of Engineering and GM Associates, Wag!

The impact

A plug-and-play solution that exponentially reduced test time

With test automation and enhanced coverage across devices and operating systems, the QA team at Wag! achieves consistent and precise tests, reaching high levels of quality assurance. As a result, they are able to capture bugs before anything goes into production.

After investing in automating their testing, the QA team at Wag! was able to reduce the average time taken for testing by 95% from an hour to less than three minutes. Test coverage across devices and operating systems and ease of integrating new devices and OS into automation test suite by simply changing one line code change, decreased time to market for new releases.

“With BrowserStack’s plug-and-play solution, tests that took several days or weeks to complete could be finished within minutes,” says Jimmy.

Watch this video to learn how Wag! improved customer experience by automating their testing operations with BrowserStack.

“We are testing much more efficiently and faster with BrowserStack. What used to take upwards of an hour just for that one test now takes less than three minutes [saving 95% in testing time].”

Jimmy DePetro, Senior Director, Head of Engineering and GM Associates, Wag!