Customers SaltStack
SaltStack (now VMware) achieves 100% test coverage for all new features using Cypress
Providing automated continuous compliance and IT security, SaltStack delivers a mission-critical service that customers trust. Here’s how the SaltStack team used Cypress to deliver their solution with confidence.
Failure is not an option
SaltStack is an award-winning IT automation platform. It helps businesses control, optimize, secure and manage all aspects of their digital infrastructure, like servers and data centers. With clients like IBM Cloud, LinkedIn and Adobe all counting on SaltStack to keep their businesses running, quality and reliability is imperative.
But early on, the SaltStack engineering team was dealing with quality challenges:
Time-consuming manual front-end tests were slowing their releases
The team was expanding fast to support rapid feature development
The front-end team was rewriting all the components in a shift in architecture from React to Angular. All these variables meant long testing cycles and increasing potential for bugs and regressions.
Innovation slowed by manual testing
In their mission to implement automated testing, accelerate QA cycles, and accelerate innovation, the team chose Cypress because:
Cypress is easy to learn and set up.
It speeds up test runs dramatically.
The Dashboard enables all team members to share (and learn from) test run results.
Support from Cypress is fast and prescriptive.
SaltStack was particularly interested in Cypress’s built-in automatic waiting. This would be very helpful in automating some of their long-running asynchronous processes, which at the time demanded time-consuming manual testing.
Cypress was so easy to set up and get going, and is easy to teach to other team members. It’s an essential tool for us to make sure our IT security services work as customers expect them to.
After deployment: better quality in less time
In the first month after adopting Cypress, one SaltStack engineer was able to write over 300 tests quickly and easily.
SaltStack accomplished a remarkable QA turnaround by utilizing Cypress to automate the majority of their end-toend tests. The developers are working more closely with the QA team – attending meetings together and achieving a deeper understanding of which tests need to be written to guarantee quality.
SaltStack now runs over 500 flake-free tests twice daily and uses the Cypress Dashboard to help everyone track and understand their test runs and monitor their improvements in quality.
The future
Cypress is now being standardized across and taught to the QA team, the front-end team and the automated test engineer pool.
Implementing Cypress has reiterated how important testing and quality are in providing a flawless customer experience. SaltStack is now creating custom Cypress commands to set up their test architecture to run faster, easier tests at scale. Cypress tests are also being extended to cover the new features SaltStack is working on. Custom security policy checks made possible by SaltStack SecOps content must be certified by the Center for Internet Security or other security organizations – and SaltStack plans on automating this validation.
Cypress has made it so simple and so easy to write tests that you can learn JavaScript at the same time as you run a test.
The Cypress documentation includes a very good "best practices guide" which helps you write the best tests that you can.
Implementing Cypress as our automation framework enabled SaltStack to adapt to a rapid pace of change.
