Rainforest QA is a distributed team. We have been distributed for seven years, with have Rainforesters all over the world and a truly global culture. On this seven year journey we have learned many lessons on how to run a global company with a coherent culture. According to the team our offsites are the most impactful thing we do to drive our distributed culture. With that in mind, here are some of our tips and learnings after doing ~20 offsites in 5 years.

In my last post I laid out our reasoning for moving from Heroku to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and other GCP services. Now I'll describe the actual migration process in detail. This isn't designed as a how-to guide for migrating from Heroku to GKE—Google has their own excellent tutorial for that—but rather a description of some of the challenges of migrating real-world production applications and how we overcame them.

We’ve made a lot of changes to our Test Writing Service over the past few months and it’s become the powerhouse of test creation for many Rainforest users. In this post, we’ll dive deep into how Rainforest Test Writing Service works, and how you can use it to scale up and streamline your test case management workflow.

Building a high-quality product takes teamwork. Maintaining a best-in-class product while continually developing high-quality features and giving a stellar customer experience, takes a quality-driven culture. We teamed up with Invotra in this new guide, Building a Culture of Quality: How Teams Can Use Quality to Achieve Business Goals, to explore the strategy behind building a culture of quality.

In our recent poll on the health of the QA industry, we found that over half of all QA teams surveyed are not very confident in their ability to ensure a high-quality product. Having a high degree of confidence in your QA process is important, as it helps you ensure that every deployment goes smoothly and that resources are being allocated efficiently.

Product quality is more important to the success of businesses than ever before. In a software market flooded with an ever-increasing pool of options, businesses and consumers alike demand high-quality, delightful experiences from the platforms and applications they use daily. In this market, getting QA right is essential. For the 2019 QA Health Survey, we polled over 250 software professionals to get a sense of how healthy quality organizations are right now.

Until late last year, Rainforest ran most of our production applications on Heroku. Heroku was a terrific platform for Rainforest in many ways: it allowed us to scale and remain agile without hiring a large Ops team, and the overall developer experience is unparalleled. But in 2018 it became clear that we were beginning to outgrow Heroku.

You may have noticed a few new (and colorful!) elements in your Rainforest run results lately. In this post, let’s walk through how the changes to your test results will help you have a cleaner, easier run review and bug triage experience in Rainforest.

One of the first steps in getting a new project underway is figuring out how much time and resources you'll need to allocate to getting the job done. But estimating these numbers can be challenging even for experienced teams. Here are some of the reasons that our engineering team think estimates are important, and the guidelines we use for making estimating project timelines a little less painful.

Getting the insights you need quickly is essential to understanding and improving your QA process. With that in mind, we’re rolling out a few new features and updates to help teams gain insight into the state of software testing for their team quickly and efficiently.