Sirion Labs: An industry leader in helping companies secure new clients through optimized contracts.
Sirion Labs is a tech company recognized as the leader in their industry by top analysts like Gartner and Forrester. They offer enterprise software solutions for Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM). Their product, SirionOne, helps their clients increase efficiency and visibility while minimizing risk for each deal they take on.
With more than 300 companies worldwide relying on SirionOne - including big names Vodafone - Sirion Labs is positioned to dominate the CLM market for a long time. However, Sirion Lab’s journey to the top wasn’t without challenges.
When Sirion Labs started experiencing rapid growth, the cracks in their manual testing process started to show. The engineering and QA teams were beyond frustrated. Releases were frequently delayed or canceled altogether, much to the distress of their Product Owner. Serious bugs slipped through the cracks and ended up in production, jeopardizing goodwill with their customers.
The QA team had initially automated tests using Selenium; however, much to their dismay, the engineering team decided to migrate the frontend framework they were using, resulting in their Selenium tests being obsolete and broken, sending their efforts down the drain. They were at their wit's end; a permanent and stable solution was badly needed.
This is how Sirion Labs overcame its growing pains and became an industry-leading Contract Lifecycle Management platform with the help of UIlicious.
Running FOUR months behind schedule.
Initially, like many tech companies, the Sirion Labs QA team ran their UI tests manually. This was adequate in the early days, but as they experienced significant growth, it was clear that manual testing was not scalable. Every time they did a release, there was a lot of regression. They would discover most bugs after the release, which meant they had to redo the testing and deployment. Moreover, the time it took to test the product grew exponentially as more features were added to an already very sophisticated product. The QAs and engineers worked hard to make each release happen and were disheartened when all that effort came to nothing each time a release was canceled. A third of the releases had to be canceled due to regressions. And pressure from the product managers was mounting, as they were running four months behind schedule on their product roadmap.
The Search for the Right Automation tool
With this in mind, Sirion Labs was looking for a solution with low overhead. One that would require fewer QA resources so they could catch up with the huge four-month backlog of work. A tool they could adopt quickly and cope with the fast pace of change as their product was evolving rapidly. They wanted an automation tool that would not waste time with complicated onboarding processes.
Sirion Labs realized that this would not work and began exploring other solutions. UIlicious was one of the solutions that were explored. After intensively comparing various tools, they chose to go with UIlicious for its ease of use and low-code nature.
UIlicious’ low-code automation tool was the obvious solution
Because of its low-code automation features, UIlicious stood out from other automation tools they explored. The Sirion Labs QA team didn't want to get into details of coding lengthy, complex scripts. They wanted a simple solution that didn’t involve their testers learning a new programming language.
“Every time we did a release, there was a lot of regression. It was extremely frustrating for our developers because we spent more time doing regression than improving our product. Everyone knew we needed to do something; we just didn’t know what exactly.”
As soon as they came across UIlicious, they had no doubts; they knew this was the solution they had been looking for.
“UIlicious is a very flexible tool. The low-code features allow our new QA hires to hit the ground running. Our QA team comprises mostly manual testers, so our number one criterion was enabling manual testers to automate tests without needing to rely on engineers. UIlicious allowed us to do this, which was a huge boon for our productivity!”
Additionally, since UIlicious is Javascript under the hood, the Sirion Labs QA team could write custom scripts for more complicated test scenarios. Furthermore, if the engineering team migrates the front end again, all of their existing test scripts will still work. That is how versatile and robust the UIlicious platform is.
Top-notch onboarding and technical support.
Sirion Labs had a smooth transition to automated testing with UIlicious. The UIlicious team provided Sirion Labs with thorough documentation and executed sample tests for them. UIlicious’ tool suite was very easy to learn and use. On top of that, technical and customer support was top-notch. Sirion Labs’ QA team could contact UIlicious team members directly, who was very responsive and helpful.
Winning with UIlicious: Zero regression & improved product quality.
Since adopting UIlicious, bugs deployed to production were reduced by 20%. This has dramatically improved their customer experience as the quality of their product increased. The UIlicious automation tool also improved the stability and consistency of their release cycle.
“Before UIlicious, we were sometimes forced to postpone releases because the code was not up to the mark in terms of quality. Now, with UIlicious, the QA team has not canceled any monthly releases. The engineers’ workloads have been greatly reduced, allowing them to do more with the same resources. The QA team now boasts of regular stable releases.”
The QA team gets notifications of test results on their Slack channels and email. The team is always up to date with the status of their tests. Every morning they get detailed reports of which tests passed and which failed. The reports clearly show which parts of the tests failed. This increases their productivity rate as they know exactly what and where to fix.
The QA team runs its tests overnight and gets detailed results in the morning. Test automation has helped to shorten the feedback cycle between the QA team and Developers, allowing them to fix issues faster and save time.
“UIlicious saved us tons of money.”
With UIlicious, we are saving about USD $72,000 per year in testing-related costs.
This cost-saving was achieved due to the reduced time and resources required for QA testing. On an annual basis, Sirion Labs was able to save 720 person days on testing during their deployments.
Time taken in hiring and training new testers has significantly been reduced and channeled into product development.