Meticulous reduces regressions, tightens feedback loops and enables teams to ship dependency upgrades faster, keeping the Engine running smoothly.
“Meticulous empowered us to ship tighter and reduce behavioral issues right away.”
—Colin Hanna, Principal Engineer, Engine
250+
engineering hours saved per month
93%
developer satisfaction rate
50
escape bugs caught each month
10x
faster redesigns
THE Challenge
True to its name, Engine is one of the fastest growing travel management platforms in the world, recently valued at over $2.1B+ with 300 engineers and counting. As their codebase grew, the team’s Cypress testing stack began facing the usual challenges such as lack of ownership, high maintenance costs, and long runtimes.
As a result, Engine was dealing with an average of 50 escaped bugs per month in its primary application, with each taking about five hours to address, including reporting, triaging, identifying the responsible team, and writing tests to prevent it from recurring.
“We struggled to maintain our Cypress suite and get a reliable signal from it,” said Principal Engineer Colin Hanna. “One of our engineers recommended Meticulous to help strengthen our testing stack.”
THE Solution
“We set it up in an hour, and we were getting visual diffs on day one,” Colin said. “It was lightning fast.”
In the final week of the pilot project, they ran a survey. 78% of engineers reported catching a bug that they had previously struggled to detect in the last week alone and 93% of the team loved the tool and felt their developer experience had improved.
“We were focused on cutting regressions and time spent on testing, and the trial convinced my team and the VP of Engineering that Meticulous was the right tool for the job,” Colin said.
Profile
Industry
Hospitality Tech
Age of codebase
7 years
Engineers
300+
“What makes Meticulous different from other testing tools for me is the amount of effort we're putting in for the value. We're getting a lot of feedback points across our application for no investment. I think I set it up in less than an hour for a new app and we were getting screenshots from day zero.“
THE Impact
Once rolled out across the company, Meticulous gave teams a visual overview of the full impact of their changes across the codebase. It quickly became indispensable and reshaped the way teams worked.
Designers had struggled to work without feedback loops as engineers ran Cypress in headless mode. Now, their process is ten times faster, and they ship more frequently.
“The design team uses Meticulous to prepare broad but minor redesigns. They load a pre-release version into our staging environment and run an introspect,” Colin said. “It’s their favorite thing.”
It’s also become a valuable tool for new engineers as well as engineers working on unfamiliar parts of the codebase, letting them ship confidently without deep business knowledge.
For context, there are 20 teams that contribute to the main application and in any given year, Colin’s team will work across all 20. Using Meticulous, his developers can dive right in without having to do tremendous amounts of research.
“Knowing where you are and getting oriented is hard when you join my team,” Colin said. “Meticulous makes it easier for new developers to learn as they go, and it helps experienced coders work faster, enhancing their productivity.”
Engineers were also able to make faster dependency upgrades. Meticulous empowered the company to migrate from React 17 to 18 and then to 19 with just minor TypeScript changes. During the migration to 18, Colin and his team had to review 264 outstanding tickets as they were moving from Styled Components to Vanilla Extract.
“With Meticulous, we were able to look at each of those 264 tickets individually,” Colin said. “If a visual element looked the same, we left it alone. If it was slightly different, we tried to figure out why. Meticulous enabled productive conversations with the owners of each of these elements, leading to unparalleled collaborative efforts.”
Monthly Test Run Stats
98,247
user flows mapped
8,562
test runs
17,288,302
screenshots
Long term Results
“Meticulous is one of our most expensive tools, but if we quantify it in terms of hours saved and reduced labor costs, it’s an incredible value,” Colin said
Colin estimates that Meticulous has saved Engine the equivalent of an engineering team dedicated to testing. But the biggest impact is the peace of mind that comes from Meticulous’ broad based coverage, enabling developers to ship confidently and deliver higher quality code.
“Meticulous’s ultimate value for me is peace of mind. We work on a big app across a lot of teams, and knowing what happened because of our changes saves us a lot of time. Meticulous helps us have the right conversations with the right people faster.”
