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Case Study

Urban Institute: Streamlining testing for a large content site

"Being able to run a set of screenshots from staging and compare them to production right before the deployment has been a huge improvement and made me feel that the product that I'm delivering is reliable."

Farnoosh Johnson
Farnoosh Johnson
Associate Director at Urban Institute

The challenge

The Urban Institute is a nonprofit research organization based in Washington, D.C., that runs multiple websites using Drupal as a platform.

The testing process used to be very manual. The main developer would spend 30 minutes checking different URLs (over 80 of them), click around the site, and then reach out to multiple other team members to review different sections of the site. This could take a few days, depending on team members’ availability. And, of course, manual testing always had room for human error.

Solution

Diffy became a first step in checking any major updates, especially Drupal core updates. Instead of going through the pages manually, it now takes 20 minutes to generate the screenshots and then minutes to review the comparison on the dashboard (Production vs. Staging).

Results

  • Significant shortening of testing time
  • Improvement in reliability of deployments, especially after hours
  • Easier onboarding for new team members in the testing process