By Rachel Bohan, QA Manager @ 888spectate
About 888spectate
888spectate is part of the 888 Group, a global leader in the online gaming industry for over 20 years. Our mission is to develop state-of-the-art technology and products that provide fun, fair and safe digital gambling products to players globally.
Based in Dublin, the 888spectate team focus on evolving the 888Sports betting platform to become a top tier sportsbook. Through innovation we aspire to give our customers the most compelling and entertaining gaming experience possible.
Quality Assurance Vs Time
In some industries code freezes and testing for weeks, sometimes even months, prior to release is acceptable but in the fast-paced sports betting industry – not a chance!
Speed is the constant driver of quality transformation- we’re constantly asking ourselves how can we test faster while still achieving quality? With the adoption of Agile and DevOps practices, our teams are now capable of deploying new and improved features to production multiple times a week.
With increased releases bring an increased regression effort. This coupled with less time to test, an expansive range of features to verify, not to mention the range of devices, browsers & operating systems to test against, brings quite a few challenges.
How do we handle this?
Collaborate
At 888spectate quality is at the center of what we do from requirements gathering right through to monitoring production performance. Our scrum teams are set up to be as autonomous as possible and are responsible for a set of related features or engineering functions. Within teams we have an open and supportive environment where Development, Product and QA collaborate daily. This openness to discussion allows us to spot issues early, address them and most importantly learn from them and continually improve our product.
Automate
As our platform scaled from 1 to over 170+ countries, our QA processes have had to scale with it. This has required rethinking our existing automation framework.
To build quality into software, teams need to get fast feedback on the impact of changes made throughout the software delivery life cycle.
Some of the goals we have set out are:
To deliver a framework that:
- Provides fast, reliable feedback throughout the software delivery life cycle, and
- Serves the whole team – automation should be accessible and easy to run for any member of the team.
Determining the ‘how to serve the whole team’ has involved many discussions with people across all roles; QA, Product, Architecture, Development, Scrum Masters and more to get their feedback on pain points and what would be useful to them.
To make the tests more accessible to the team we found that we needed to focus on improving speed and reliability. The team have looked towards a multi-tier test approach to achieve this, with some examples like:
- Testing at API level, which is faster to run and less fragile compared to UI tests.
- Using Elasticsearch to store data on our test runs and developing queries to provide insights on the historical runs which we can then use to make decisions.
Validate
There is still very much a need for manual testing. QA Engineers have a unique perspective on our product because their role is to always approach it from a user’s point of view. Automation is predictable, users and by proxy QA Engineers are not. Their time spent exploring and evaluating beyond the happy path provides invaluable insight throughout the development life cycle and in particular the crucial go-no-go meetings.
As we release to even more countries, implement new technologies and processes, one thing will remain constant – delivering quality is very much a team sport.
Apply Today
Now is an exciting time to join our expanding team and become part of the journey in becoming a top tier sportsbook. Interested? We have openings across QA, Development, Architecture and Product. Apply today! Speak with our recruitment team between 10am and 4pm at Tech Careers Expo on 15th July.