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Leading global gaming company

How a global gaming company achieved 80% faster releases and near-zero production defects with Tricentis qTest and SeaLights

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reduction in production defects

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faster release speed

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coverage across all code changes

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Company overview

The gaming industry continues to grow more diverse in the media it occupies, spanning trading cards, mobile applications, console games, and more. One such division at a leading global gaming company accounts for millions of end users across different channels every year, with no signs of slowing down. When a new quality engineering leader came on board, his goal was to ensure a scalable, automated, and data-driven approach to quality across an ever-growing product suite and user base.

As part of its commitment to delivering high-quality digital experiences, the company continuously invests in improving software quality and test management. As its software development efforts expanded, the quality assurance process needed to be modernized to match rapidly increasing scope and velocity, as well as extremely high expectations for product quality.

Challenges

  • Lack of unified quality measurement: Test plans and results were tracked in spreadsheets, clouding understand testing progress or assess release readiness. Different teams reported on different quality metrics, making it difficult to get a clear, apples-to-apples understanding of quality.
  • Regression testing bottlenecks: The team lacked a standardized regression suite, making it difficult to determine whether sufficient testing had been performed before release.
  • High production defect rate: Despite a high test case pass rate, two to three defects slipped into production each week, indicating gaps in coverage.
  • Lack of visibility into requirements coverage: Limited ability to understand full test coverage that required time-consuming manual requirements mapping.

To address these challenges, the company turned to Tricentis qTest for test management and Tricentis SeaLights for test gap analytics and quality intelligence.

Establishing a unified view of quality with qTest’s centralized test management

When the current software testing lead joined the team, he set out to build a unified testing organization from scratch. His first priority was gaining visibility into testing efforts across teams.

Before qTest, teams reported test progress in spreadsheets, creating a fragmented and inconsistent view of release readiness. Different teams provided different quality metrics, making it nearly impossible to align on a single version of the truth. Attempting to stitch together a unified view into the team’s test progress or results was an exercise in futility, making it difficult to understand exactly which testing activities were even happening, let alone if they were effective.

With qTest, the quality engineering team was able to standardize test case management across teams, ensuring all test cases and execution results were housed in a central location for easy access and analysis. qTest’s native integration with Jira allows the team to align test cases and results with requirements and track progress in real time, “at a moment’s notice,” according to the team lead. This real-time visibility empowers various smaller teams to work in their preferred methodologies, whether Kanban or Agile Scrum, while still aligning testing efforts across the organization.

With qTest, the company trimmed release cycles from eight weeks to just three weeks, enabling faster, more predictable releases. “qTest has been instrumental in creating a unified view of quality,” the team lead said. “At a moment’s notice, we can understand progress toward release readiness and make data-driven decisions.”

Reducing production defects with SeaLights’ test gap analytics

Once the team had a solid foundation of visibility into testing activity with qTest, they turned to another goal: Maximizing testing efficiency while reducing production defects. Despite a high pass rate, defects were still reaching production. The problem? Not all code changes were covered by requirements or test cases, causing untested code changes to slip through undetected. For example, changes to legacy code weren’t always accounted for.

To tackle this challenge and take their software quality to the next level, they implemented SeaLights to get detailed insight into new untested code changes, supplementing with another view that proved highly useful. With SeaLights’ comprehensive analysis into code coverage, the team was able to automatically block untested changes from reaching production and eliminate gaps in their test plan. This resulted in a significant drop in production defects, as well as improved quality governance and control.

With Tricentis SeaLights, the team has achieved:

  • Cut test cycle time and costs by executing only code change-related tests
  • Troubleshoot and fix issues faster by focusing on relevant tests
  • Minimize the risk of production errors by identifying and addressing gaps in test coverage

“What we really like about SeaLights is that we can quickly see our quality risks and easily understand what our tests are not covering as our codebase changes over time,” said the team’s software quality lead.

Combining qTest and SeaLights for unparalleled visibility and intelligence

Using qTest and SeaLights together, the team reduced production incidents by 90% — going from two to three incidents per week to less than one per month. Additionally, they can now verify 100% coverage across all code changes, including legacy dependencies, eliminating guesswork in test prioritization and improving go-live confidence.

With qTest’s native Jira integration, the team can easily align test cases with Jira user stories to ensure all requirements are covered with test cases. Then, with SeaLights, they can validate that those test cases provide sufficient risk coverage before release, ensuring no untested, high-risk code changes reach production. The team lead reports that the two tools in tandem have drastically improved both their release confidence and speed.

Results

With Tricentis qTest and SeaLights, the team has created a scalable, efficient, and intelligent testing framework — one that ensures every new release is faster, higher quality, and fully tested.

Key results include:

  • A 90% reduction in production incidents
  • Release cycle time cut by over 60%, from eight weeks to three weeks
  • Improved release confidence by ensuring no untested code reaches production
  • A simplified way to assess release readiness with a single source of truth across testing activities

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