Swoove <> Gattaca

”We needed a QA partner who could start testing right after a feature was developed, fit well with our workflow, and delivered results fast. Gattaca is the partner we were searching for.”

— Claudiu Matei, CTO @ Swoove

Results

~60%

time saved for engineering team

210%

faster release cycle

fewer regressions

16,536

test runs in last 75 days

Background

Swoove is on a mission to democratize 3D animation. The goal is a powerful and user-friendly animation platform. A space where you can unleash imagination, freely.

Swoove team is fast and ships new builds several times a week
Claudiu is an experienced software architect and CTO at Swoove. Claudiu understood the impact QA can have on user retention, release speed, and on freeing up core engineering and product teams.

Pain points

Release speed was hampered: Swoove team is ambitious and ships builds daily, but QA and issue triage between builds slows down releases to production.

Not enough time: Swoove team works hard to deliver on their vision, but has limited resources. There is not enough time to both deliver on the roadmap (shipping new features) and to test core app flows (dealing with regressions and bug triage)
Missed issues compound: Bugs trickle down from release to release and compound. This increases cost to fix to a point where releases might be blocked.

Solution

Swoove team decided to partner with Gattaca to help accelerate Swoove, increase app quality to drive retention, and save valuable time of engineering and product leaders.

Gattaca did a custom integration for Swoove, without distracting Swoove from their core work. Swoove team was able to get to 95% UX test coverage.
As a result, Swoove team can ship with greater confidence, knowing that a number of issues are fixed and 100s of test runs have been performed on each build.

Working with other QA vendors in the past did not deliver results

Before Swoove and Gattaca engaged in a partnership, Swoove team shared that they’ve previously worked with two QA vendors. Each time they were disappointed in quality and responsiveness. With Gattaca, the feedback loop and level of care is different.

Zero-integration service made it easy

Swoove engaged with Gattaca during a busy month. Spending valuable Product Owner and Developer time on an integration was not an option. Spending valuable time on maintaining tests (something that is common in other solutions) was also not an option. Gattaca handled 100% of the integration and test maintenance when things broke, enabling the Swoove team to focus on their roadmap.

”Test automation was a key need for us. And having a team that could also lead QA, suggest better tech and processes was a huge advantage”

Keeping up with the speed

Swoove team is fast. Daily releases, new features, a bold vision. Whether it is coverage of esoteric scenarios or regular regression testing, Gattaca was able to match Swoove speed despite being in a different timezone.

Saving valuable Developer and Product Owner energy allowed Swoove team to focus on higher priority issues

Before working with Gattaca a non-trivial % of the team's time was spent on logging issues, reproducing bugs, and triaging issues. There are two core problems here that are now solved. First, all of those hours are now spent on driving features and high priority internal tasks. Second, there is a significant amount of time lost when developers and product owners break their workflow to test the app or to triage the issue. Now the Swoove team has more energy to drive their vision forward.

Finding a true developer partner

Initial objective was a reliable testing partner, but Swoove found a developer partner in Gattaca. For example, Swoove team and Gattaca partnered on solutions to engineering questions such as building a performant video feed on mobile or a custom system to test rendering pipeline for each digital asset.

”Our main goal was to cut down cycle time. Having a QA team that quickly adapted and delivered results helped us spend less time finding and fixing issues, so we could ship faster.”