It would definitely cost us at least 3x the cost of QA Wolf to build a team of in-house QA engineers. And it's probably much more than that if you were to factor in all of the additional overhead that’s required to run the infrastructure.
—Devon Yang, co-founder & CTO
To say mortgage loan origination is complex is an understatement. Dozens of documents and thousands of data points are needed from third-party systems — all of it has to be kept current and the math has to be perfect. Vesta’s platform stores it, organizes it, and automates loan processing for lenders.
If you’ve ever bought or refinanced a home in the US, you probably have a sense of how much information is required and how many people are involved in the process — borrowers, lenders, underwriters, appraisers, title companies, credit agencies, and more. The scope and scale of the transaction means that software like Vesta has countless workflow permutations, special views and rules for multiple of user types, integrations with legacy systems; and there’s zero tolerance for errors in any of the calculations.
While unit and integration testing is a critical aspect of Vesta’s quality assurance program, only comprehensive end-to-end testing can ensure that new features can be added safely without regressing existing functionality.
However, building and maintaining sufficient coverage in-house would cost more than $480,000/year in headcount alone, and sequential test runs would have slowed down the continuous deployment pipeline that the team runs. Additionally, many of the tests that Vesta needs to run have complex data validation requirements, like validating the output calculations on PDFs.
Vesta practices continuous deployment to release and iterate quickly. With QA Wolf integrated into their deployment pipeline, Vesta can check for regressions nightly and make sure that they can move fast without breaking the features that their customers depend on.
Anyone who works in the tech industry knows that hiring good engineers is an extremely difficult thing to do. And I want engineers to be building product as much of their time as possible. QA Wolf prevents us from introducing regressions so that the engineers are working on things that contribute to the business.
—Devon Yang, co-founder & CTO
As Vesta builds new features, developers or product managers share video clips with QA Wolf. Additional tests are outlined, approved, and added to the test suite so that the team can move onto the next project and know they won’t break something in production.
One thing that has been super valuable is we just send you all the clips or videos of a flow that we want tested, and that magically appears. QA Wolf is super autonomous. It's very minimal effort on our side to explain what we want, and a huge time saver for our team.
—Devon Yang, co-founder & CTO