Meet Sai
Sai Venkatesh works for a leading-edge technology company based out of California, let's call it Rocket9. Rocket9 delivers multiple products including on-premises products and SaaS solutions. He is the VP of Engineering for a group of 75 developers. Rocket9 delivers on-premises software
The problem: Slow velocity is crippling innovation
At Rocket9, Sai was not surprised to see that software delivery times were high, a direct outcome of a complex codebase that has grown over the years. He is acutely aware that the developers are unhappy because of the slow velocity. He is starting to see a steady attrition especially in Silicon Valley, where developers are at a premium.
He yearns to bring the velocity, productivity from his startup days to Rocket9, thus making his developers happy and plug the attrition risk.
…saving 30-60 minutes per day to make my developers productive would be staggering for us.
The velocity, attrition, complex code base is hurting Rocket9’s ability to innovate.
Side note: “Slow Velocity” is a conclusion Sai reached based on grumblings he hears from developers. Launchable was able to back this gut with data. His lighthouse team of 75 developers was pushing only 6 changes per day and it took 5 patches to get 1 change in. This was an eye opener for Sai.
The Solution: Smarter testing to innovate faster
Rocket9 is throwing a lot to drive velocity. They have allocated a couple of engineers to drive pipeline automations on a multi-year project. The hypothesis is that if builds go faster, developers can push more commits and thus drive innovation.
The problem is that these efforts will not impact the biggest bottleneck which are tests. In their on-premises product line, the basic acceptance tests takes 3 days!
Launchable brings Smart Testing to speed up testing times
Today, the team runs 199 builds per week. Each build runs for 51 minutes with a test run of 22 minutes. Launchable brough its Predictive Test Selection to smartly identify the tests likely to fail and we prioritized them first.
The Launchable provided them an opportunity to use only 10% tests on any commit to find a failing build. In other words, if I was a developer pushing my change in and wanted to know if I am going to break the build then Launchable can find a breaking build with 90% confidence with 10% of tests. I can pick the test that fails the build and go about debugging it very quickly.
So what does this mean in absolute terms? Or how quickly is how quickly?
How about a 90% reduction in test time or a 40% reduction in the entire build time.
The benefits with Launchable
Find issues earlier. Innovate faster This is clear that developers are finding failures 40% faster. They can fix issues and go back to pushing more.
Happier developers Developers are now pushing more code in. Fast turnaround time leaves developers happier.
Where to next
The goal for Rocket9 has been to get to their on-premises application where the acceptance tests takes 3 days. They are looking to bring down the feedback time of this test harness from 3 days to 2 and ultimately to 1 day.
In conclusion, Sai has brought in the power of AI and ML for one of his teams; relatively effortlessly. The SaaS team is innovating faster and other teams are clamoring to bring Launchable to their projects.