TodayTix

The Customer

TodayTix is the leading marketplace for tickets to the biggest shows in town, at amazing prices. Through TodayTix’s various web, Android, and iOS apps, users can score tickets to the most popular events such as Hamilton, Wicked, or Dear Evan Hansen. Over 6 million tickets have been sold via TodayTix to date.

The Environment

To say that TodayTix works in a complex environment would be an understatement. Their teams manage a wealth of internal and external apps to meet their business needs, hosted on Web, Android, and iOS. With hundreds of thousands of users around the world, including New York City, London’s West End, and Australia, they have the added challenge of supporting a massive, global user base.

The Vision

The need to be able to move quickly and deliver changes rapidly to customers has required the teams at TodayTix to rethink how they approach quality. Ultimately, the goal is to achieve nearly 100% automated test coverage of application functionality. Driving this goal is a desire to move completely to a continuous delivery model, so customers can see rapid benefits from the new features TodayTix is delivering.

The Challenge

When working with the most common open source automation tools, such as Selenium, too much time was spent on non-value added tasks like test framework maintenance. Additionally, as the team continued to scale and new members were added, there was a steep learning curve. These challenges in adopting and maintaining the solution delayed the progress towards the vision of continuous delivery, and reduced the overall return on investment for the test automation initiatives.

The Process

Liam Alizadeh from TodayTix embarked on a journey to investigate tools that could help with changing the way automated testing was done. He began by selecting a short list of automated testing tools to evaluate from the wealth of tools on the market. As someone leading both the quality assurance and overall delivery processes for TodayTix, he had the perspective of the requirements needed to satisfy all stakeholders. Additionally, his 6 years of experience in the field have allowed him to work with a variety of testing tools and gather a deep understanding of what requirements to prioritize.  

The Requirements

After meeting with various members across the teams, Liam assembled a comprehensive list of requirements for their new testing tool. Some of the main requirements highlighted in his research included: 

• Easy to learn and adopt, even for those with less technical training or coding experience
• Ability to support web and mobile applications (including Android and iOS) 
• API with ability to integrate to other enterprise applications including CircleCI, Slack, Clubhouse, and TestRail
• Easy to understand reports on test coverage, failures, and release progress
• Cloud based, and compatible with the existing containerized environment
• Robust support and documentation to allow for easy onboarding and troubleshooting
• Affordable, so that each and every tester can have access to the tool when needed

With these features in mind, Liam would be able to narrow down the list of tools to those which would work well within TodayTix.

The Search

Liam kicked off a thorough search of tools on the market, perusing various forums, articles, and other sources of test automation trends. He came across TestProject through his research, and it quickly became one of the leading tools in the evaluation. It eventually came down to a short list, TestProject, Cypress.io, and Selenium. After consideration, TestProject became the favorite, due to some key considerations: 

• TestProject supports web as well as mobile (Android and iOS)
• TestProject provides an interface for those who wanted to script as well as those who lacked technical skills
• TestProject offers quick support via live chat as well as a thorough forum and documentation to ease onboarding
• TestProject is 100% free, including the platform, hosting, as well as live support

Now that the choice to implement TestProject had been made, Liam was ready to embark on the process of implementing TestProject across TodayTix’s various teams.

The Implementation

The process of getting TestProject up and running at TodayTix was relatively painless, with initial results coming quickly. Liam first created a playground project, and within the first day he had users creating sample automated tests that could be replayed without problems. As time went on, best practices were established with the assistance of the TestProject support team. By the end of the 1st month, most users were fully onboarded and able to contribute to automated test coverage. TestProject has now been completely adopted across all of the teams within TodayTix, with ongoing work to tweak the current processes and provide further integration to their toolchain.

The Results

With TestProject fully deployed, Liam has been able to see tremendous improvements to his teams’ automation testing, including: 

• Improvement in tester efficiency, with all users now able to contribute fully to automated test coverage, regardless of technical skillset.
• Reduction in onboarding time, with users fully enabled and contributing in one month or less, as compared to several months previously.
• Increase in test coverage, with 70% of functionality now covered with automated tests, and a plan to achieve 100% automated test coverage by the end of 2020.
• Reduction in test framework maintenance, from 20-30% of time spent on it previously to less than 5% of time spent on it with TestProject.

Overall, the benefits of TestProject have been instrumental in supporting the teams’ shift to continuous delivery.

The Advice

Overall, Liam would recommend TestProject to other organizations looking for a similar solution to tackle Web, Mobile, and even API automation. His advice to ensure a smooth implementation is as follows: 

1. There’s a notion that using a tool like TestProject somehow makes you less of an engineer, or that “engineering” has to be hard. I believe the most effective individuals are ones who see things from a value proposition perspective. From this view, you can clearly see that it’s not how you do something that matters but rather the results you achieve and the value you add to an organization. 
2. Focus on getting the v1 of the workflow up and running to start adding immediate value. Then identify improvement areas, prioritize, and plan to iteratively make improvements until you reach the ideal state. We’re constantly improving workflow with TestProject even today, but overcomplicating things too early can risk success.
3. Codify your best practices, and share them across all teams. How and when to use certain locator strategies, how to create a reusable test, and how to create good test data are a few of the things you might need to document and distribute.
4. Alway stress reusability. The power of TestProject will grow as you have a wealth of small, reusable test assets which can be leveraged to easily create more complicated, end to end tests.
5. Don’t hesitate to reach out to TestProject support. Though the documentation and forum are very complete, the support is next level! Reaching out to them can get tough problems solved quickly so you can focus on what matters – testing.