SQA2 Qualitics:
From Bottleneck to Breakthrough: Reviving QA Automation in a Global Ticketing Platform
ISSUE:
A global ticketing provider was struggling with a stagnant QA automation effort. The automation pipeline was outdated, inflexible, and misaligned with evolving development practices—resulting in slow releases, redundant manual testing, and reduced confidence in coverage.
BACKGROUND:
- The automation suite had become bloated and hard to maintain, relying on outdated tools and approaches.
- QA automation coverage was shallow, focusing on narrow test cases rather than mission-critical flows.
- Developers had limited visibility into automated results, reducing shared ownership of quality.
- CI/CD integration was fragmented, preventing automation from accelerating the development pipeline.
KEY SIGNALS:
- Flaky, slow-running tests delayed releases and introduced instability into CI pipelines.
- QA teams spent excessive time manually validating areas that automation should have covered.
- Business stakeholders lacked confidence in test reliability, resulting in redundant oversight and release hesitancy.
- Developers disengaged from QA feedback due to poor test clarity and feedback delays.
STRATEGIC IMPACT:
- Reduced speed-to-market: Inefficient QA automation slowed feature delivery.
- Eroded cross-team trust: Developers viewed automation as a QA-owned burden rather than a shared asset.
- Wasted effort: Time and budget were drained by maintaining brittle scripts that failed to deliver value.
- Innovation drag: Teams avoided risk due to uncertainty in regression coverage and testing gaps.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
- Rebuild automation from the ground up—prioritize high-impact workflows, and remove legacy test bloat.
- Standardize on a modern automation framework (e.g., Cypress, Playwright, or updated Selenium) that fits the team’s tech stack and provides better reporting and debugging.
- Integrate automation fully into CI/CD pipelines, triggering feedback on every commit or PR.
- Implement a QA/Dev collaboration model—where developers co-own tests and leverage automated feedback during development.
- Establish dashboards and analytics to measure automation ROI and identify flakiness or redundancy in test coverage.
EXPECTED OUTCOMES:
- Streamlined releases with automation embedded directly into the development lifecycle.
- Elevated test reliability and visibility, reducing time spent on manual regression.
- Improved team alignment and shared ownership of quality.
- Long-term reduction in testing costs and increased confidence to deploy at speed.