Wurl Streamlines Testing Infrastructure Management with mabl

Friend of mabl Wurl leads the CTV industry by helping content companies, streamers, and advertisers reach millions of consumers worldwide. Their industry-leading platform functions as the glue for streaming services and smart TVs, enabling partners to distribute, monetize, and market their content across the world’s connected TV ecosystem. A quality experience is central to serving these content creators as they deliver new stories to their audiences. 

Managing quality across Wurl’s complex platform is a demanding process, especially since Wurl prides itself on their customer experience. Director of QA Engineering, Pradgnya Kulkarni, leads a team of software testers and QA engineers focused on helping the Wurl software development organization continuously deliver without sacrificing their seamless customer experience. When Pradgnya first started with Wurl four years ago, the quality team primarily relied on manual testing to discover defects, but that was too slow and cumbersome for Wurl’s platform. As a result,  the QA team began investigating automated testing tools, starting with code-heavy frameworks that needed extensive maintenance and management. At the time, the bulk of the QA team didn’t have the coding expertise to create tests from scratch, limiting their ability to scale test automation and putting extra work on Wurl’s QA engineers. Between test creation, test maintenance, and testing infrastructure management, the code-heavy testing tools were too slow to match the pace of Wurl’s delivery cycles. 

Pradgnya had used mabl at a previous role, so she began investigating low-code test automation as a more efficient alternative to legacy testing tools. Faster test creation, reduced test maintenance, and highly responsive customer support made mabl’s test automation solution a much better fit for Wurl’s quality strategy. 

Continuously Improving the Customer Experience with Automated Regression Testing 

The development organization at Wurl is extremely attuned to customer needs, even to the point of planning sprints and feature work around customer requirements. Their primary focus: evolving the customer-facing platform that enables Wurl customers to schedule their lineups, upload new assets, and manage their workspaces. The UI of this service is essential for a smooth customer experience, which is why feature delivery is heavily tailored to customer needs, rather than purely dictated by business requirements. As Wurl’s quality leaders, Pradgnya and her team collaborate heavily with the developers to coordinate sprint planning, product meetings, and testing strategies. 

Wurl relies on extensive smoke and regression testing to make sure that each new feature or fix doesn’t impact the UI in unexpected ways. Before mabl, maintaining this thorough software testing strategy was time-consuming. 

“We get the most value out of our regression suites when we run them every day. Before mabl, we had to run them manually – and that made it hard to guarantee routine testing,” said Pradgyna. “Now we can easily execute those regression suites in addition to regular smoke testing for bug fixes. Automating these valuable, but routine tests, saves us a lot of time.”

Less Infrastructure Management Means More Agile Software Development  

Since Pradgnya joined Wurl four years ago, their quality team has evolved into an in-house team of QA engineers with impressive programming experience. Though mabl was initially useful for supporting manual testers that needed low-code to automated tests, their QA engineers with experience automating tests in code-heavy frameworks still prefer mabl since it reduces the amount of effort needed to maintain Wurl’s software testing strategy. Its ease-of-use extends from faster test creation to reducing the overhead of managing a testing infrastructure. Mabl allows the quality team to simply focus on quality, even as the Wurl platform evolves. 

Pradgnya explained: “If my number of test cases increased by 100, I used to worry about spinning up a new machine, getting approval, and navigating all of that red tape. Now, I don’t have to worry about that. My team can run as many tests as needed in parallel, knowing that everything is taken care of behind-the-scenes in mabl. We can easily automate as many test cases as needed without worrying about the infrastructure.”  

Eliminating testing infrastructure concerns contributes to the Wurl team being able to further accelerate testing and delivery cycles. Given the comprehensiveness of the Wurl platform, automated testing is critical for covering as much of the customer experience as possible. Flexible infrastructure ensures that quality can adapt to new features and user needs. Pradgnya is proud that her team can quickly execute thorough testing strategies for any features or fixes that come through the development pipeline, an essential attribute for an organization as customer-focused as Wurl. With mabl, the Wurl QA team can run their all-important regression tests for any new features in less than a day. That agility gives the entire Wurl organization extra confidence as they respond to customer needs. 

Mabl Support Makes Wurl Go ‘Round 

Wurl has been a friend of mabl for several years, investing in low-code test automation as their team and product grow. For Pradgnya, the foundation for this partnership has been the support provided by the mabl team. If Wurl has a question or issue, they know they’ll have a rapid and informative response from their customer success manager that ensures Wurl can continue accelerating product velocity. Between the reduced effort needed to maintain their testing infrastructure, faster test creation, and reliable support, Wurl can continue delivering the future of connected TV with confidence.