Case Study Chromatic. Large Multisite with Tugboat

Diffy has a sort of multiplier effect that we can focus on the things that matter, where humans can do a better job of impacting and letting machines worry about this stuff that can be automated.

Alfonso Gómez-Arzola
Software Architect in Chattanooga, TN

The challenge

Chromatic, US-headquartered distributed Drupal agency focusing on building and maintaining platforms with large volumes of data.

Chromatic got to work on a project that is a large multisite (over 20 sites). Every change needed to be tested across all the sites to make sure no regressions were introduced. This is very time tedious work that takes a lot of time.

Solution

The Chromatic team set up a workflow for every pull request they spin up multiple Tugboat environments (one per site) and trigger Diffy’s visual regression testing comparing those environments with their production sites. This often times showed that 15 sites returned OK but 5 had some changes. That allows the team to know exactly where to go and check what happened to address the issues even before they get merged.

Results

1. New process greatly reduces the footprint of potential error
2. The team has way less stress triple-checking every iteration of a given component
3. Team leader can be more hands-off and focus on strategic things like planning and selling the client on new features.