>Zenefits is free online HR Software that powers human resource needs - payroll, benefits, compliance ... manage them
rainforest
Case Study:
Zenefits Leverages Rainforest’s Continuous QA Platform To Test New Features and Get Results In Five Minutes Summary: 4Zenefits is free online HR Software that powers human resource needs - payroll, benefits, compliance and more – for more than 10,000 businesses in 47 states. 4Zenefits development teams deploy new features up to 3 times a day. With no QA team, they needed a simple way for developers to immediately test new features and get results back in less than 30 minutes. 4Rainforest provides Zenefits with the human acceptance testing it needs to ensure that all aspects of the service are usable by anyone. 4Rainforest allows Zenefits developers to write tests without any code and, for smoke tests, receive results in 5 minutes.
The Challenge: Zenefits is a free HR automation service that makes running a business and managing employees effortless. Employers can have multiple HR systems and traditionally they don’t talk to each other. Zenefits connects them, to manage them all in one place. Once connected, Zenefits automates all of the HR processes going forward. What used to take weeks - processing complaints, updating data, onboarding new hires, enrolling in health insurance - Zenefits automates. Zenefits does this for free, without any contracts or disruption of service. Today, Zenefits supports more than 10,000 businesses in 47 countries. For Zenefits the ability to deliver new, enhanced, and integrated HR features is the key to their market disruption. Zenefits Founder and CTO Laks Srini knows that delivering good features and products is his #1 priority. However, with a small development team and no dedicated in-house QA, Srini needs a way to quickly test
Zenefits Industry Healthcare Technology Founded 2013 Headquarters San Francisco, CA Funding $583.6 M Employees 1000 Customers 10,000 businesses with 100,000 employees in 47 states
new capabilities during the development process. “We are an enterprise product,” explained Laks. “We can’t move fast and break things for a day and not worry about it. People need to get health insurance. People need to get paid. People need to request vacations. They need to do all these things through us, and it’s really important that Zenefits always works.” Before Rainforest, Zenefits engineers were responsible for the entire QA process and relied on automated QA for testing. Automation wasn’t delivering the in-depth, human results the team needed. “We deploy often, sometimes three times a day. Before Rainforest we had a lot of automated systems doing QA. The catch with automated systems, though, is that they cannot look at a feature and say ‘this button looks wrong,’ or understand people’s perceptions of a feature as they look at it,” Laks said. The Solution When Srini was looking for a QA service that would mimic human responses, as well as his quick development cycle, he turned to Rainforest’s Continuous QA Platform to make sure that every feature was tested thoroughly before it was deployed. “Now we augment our automated testing with Rainforest QA, which provides us the human elements of QA. We can ask questions like, ‘Does this make sense?’, “The great thing about Rainforest is that they have ‘Do you know how to use it?’ These testers available 24/7, and we’ve been able to get kinds of results help a lot with usability. We view Rainforest as the last area results for smoke tests, which we run every time we of defense, and we use their testing deploy, in under 5 minutes. With a Continuous QA results to make sure that there’s a platform like Rainforest, you can move fast without human mind that agrees with our breaking things.” automated results.” With Rainforest, Zenefits engineers who develop the products are able to write user acceptance script tests Laks Srini on their own and without code. “The CTO, Zenefits Rainforest support team was there to help them get the most out of their tests. Srini explained, “You have to write tests well and Rainforest support helped us understand what was a good test or a bad test and how to get the most in-depth results from our tests. They broke it down step-by-step and now the team can create tests for almost everything.” The Results Rainforest has given Zenefits an on-demand QA testing platform that runs at the speed of their development teams. “The great thing about Rainforest is that they have testers available 24/7, and we’ve been able to get results for smoke tests, which we run every time we deploy, in under 5 minutes,” Srini said. “This is great for us because we deploy throughout the day, sometimes 3am, sometimes 3pm. If we had to have our own internal teams doing this, we would have to set up phone calls, make sure testers are available. If testers are not available it’s not going to go live. Many problems like these have been avoided by using Rainforest.”
Typically a company with one hundred engineers, like Zenefits, would employ a software QA team of up to twenty people. With the average QA salary ranging between $100 - 125k, this is a real savings of upwards of $2M a year. And for the Zenefits CTO the ROI is clear. Laks clarified the impact of Rainforest on the end user experience. “In terms of ROI, Rainforest has been great. We don’t have anyone, other than the engineers themselves, that specifically does human QA and testing. And that’s thanks to Rainforest. To be able to have peace of mind when we deploy knowing any human can actually log in, get around the website and everything works, is awesome.” In the end Zenefits is able to deliver more value to their customers by innovating faster and delivering on their promise to solve HR bottlenecks. “Our development motto is move fast, constantly update assumptions, and write tests, with an emphasis on write tests. With a Continuous QA platform like Rainforest you can move fast without breaking things,” he concluded.
About Rainforest QA
rainforest www.RainforestQA.com
Founded in 2012, Rainforest is the only Continuous QA Platform designed for Agile and Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery. With Rainforest’s API, engineering, product and quality teams can design without code, run tests on demand, and get results in less than 30 minutes. Companies like Zenefits, Betterworks, Librato, and PopSugar currently develop faster and ship great products using Rainforest for Continuous QA. Rainforest is a Y-Combinator graduate and Heavybit Industries member whose investors include Storm Ventures, Rincon, Andreessen Horowitz, Morado, and Crosslink.
