Working with wolves

We’re a platform-enabled service. The QA Wolf platform is used by our team of in-house QA engineers to build, run, and maintain end-to-end tests for our customers.

The platform itself uses Microsoft’s Playwright framework and a specially-optimized kubernetes back-end that lets us run millions of tests in parallel in headful browsers, each running inside a separate docker container.

Our QA engineers watch the test runs and investigate the failures. When a test needs to be updated, they do that inside the QA Wolf platform. If the test found a bug, we report it through the platform, Slack or Teams, and your connected issue tracker. You have full access to the QA Wolf platform, where you can review test code, investigate failures, and make requests for new coverage.

QA Wolf sets up a shared Slack or Teams channel for the teams that we work with, and there’s someone available on those channels 24/5. We use the channel to share information about the test suite and bug reports, and you can use it to ask questions, request new coverage, or just say hello.

We recommend you add your development team to this channel to maximize visibility into any issues we find. Some teams also have a rotation where one person each week watches the shared channel to ensure bug reports are noticed and any questions we have are answered.

If you are having trouble accessing your shared channel, reach out to [email protected].

We investigate every test failure so your team can focus on shipping. We report any bugs we find in the shared Slack or Teams channel, your issue tracker, and through the QA Wolf platform.

When a test is marked as bug or needing maintenance, it will no longer run to reduce noise in your test suite. We periodically revalidate all bugs, but are also available to check any test immediately if you ask us to.

Sure can. Read through our documentation on how to set it up. You can also install our GitHub app to get test results there.

QA Wolf provides infrastructure to run your tests in 100% parallel. This means you can get test results in a few minutes.

This contrasts to running tests in most CI providers, which can take anywhere from 30 minutes to hours (see the Cypress public dashboard for examples). Since browsers are resource intensive, most CI providers do not provide sufficient computing power to run more than a few tests at a time. QA Wolf addresses this limitation by using a separate container for every test.

While QA Wolf can run tests in 100% parallel, we’ve found that some customer applications cannot handle too much concurrent traffic. In these scenarios, we limit the number of tests we run at once to avoid overloading your test environment.

Anyone on your team can request test coverage for new features. A few ways to do that:

1. Sending us a message in Slack or Teams describing the coverage request. Short videos of the feature with any useful context about expected behaviors and edge cases is very helpful. If there’s already a URL in the staging, QA, or dev environment you can include that link as well.
2. Making a request through the QA Wolf platform. Fill in the form with the same details as above and we’ll add it to your suite. 
3. Adding a QAWolf label to a ticket in your issue tracker. It’s helpful if all the same context is on that ticket. Even if the feature is still being mocked up, we can start preparing test outlines to review with you.
   

After we complete your request, we close the loop with you in Slack or Teams, and list your new test(s) in the next weekly update.

When someone new joins your team, we recommend adding them to the Slack or Teams channel. If it’s helpful, your QA Lead or Customer Success Manager can also schedule a meeting to get them up to speed.

Existing customers should reach out in their Slack or Teams channel, and your QA lead or CSM will schedule some time. 

If you’re interested in joining the Wolf Pack, go here to schedule a demo and discuss your testing needs.

QA Wolves are available 24 hours a day during the work week (Monday through Friday). Specifically, our hours are Sunday at 4pm PST to Friday at 5pm PST. We start on Sunday since that is Monday for our team in Australia. 🐨