How Cheetah Digital cured testing headaches

“It was a daily struggle just trying to wedge our testing information into this [legacy] tool,” says Mary Nelsen, who heads up testing at Cheetah Digital, a provider of enterprise marketing technology solutions. Nelsen sat down with us recently to explain how her team, which is responsible for testing the company’s web-based marketing platform, reached a tipping point trying to test in an agile development environment with a testing tool built for waterfall. For a while, testers were able to compensate — a testament to the strength of the team — but last year, after missing a major deadline, Nelsen had had enough. [Read more below the video.]

Cheetah Digital offers a seamless, web-based marketing tool suite, powered by a real-time data platform. Because customers must quickly make business decisions based on this data, quality is critically important. And when customers demanded additional features, the company quickly ramped up development to extend the platform with new features and tools.

As the development team scaled to meet these significantly expanded requirements, a testing overload and the inability to communicate quickly with developers were hindering Cheetah’s success. This resulted in wasted time, missed testing deadlines, delayed releases and a lot of pain. Nelsen says that in addition to these critical issues, their previous testing tool created duplication, confusion, and even a hatred toward testing. Something as simple as documenting a bug would “add [at least] an hour to your day to try and get this bug into the system.”

Nelsen and her team recognized that they had to find an easier to use tool that would tighten the developer-tester feedback loop, and that’s when they turned to Tricentis qTest. Today, Nelsen says communication is streamlined, transparent and clear. Tricentis qTest’s real-time Jira integration enables the testing team to communicate defects to developer in real time, as well as be notified right away when new code is ready for testing. Missed deadlines are a thing of the past. The Cheetah team also took this opportunity to centralize their test case library and test data, so it’s easy to access and share across teams.

“I’m not struggling anymore,” Nelsen says. I can actually focus on testing.”