How Meticulous Helped Engine Reclaim 250+ Hours Each Month

Overcoming skepticism and embracing high-fidelity results

At first, Hanna was “extremely skeptical.The claims smelled like magic that wasn’t real to me,” he said.

After learning that Meticulous combined session management, network mocking, and code coverage injection, however, Hanna changed his mind. He championed the platform and convinced the team to run a pilot.

“Once I could wrap my brain around how it works, I wanted to see if Meticulous could deliver,” Hanna said.

Implementation was easier than he expected.

“We set it up in an hour, and we were getting visual diffs on day one,” Hanna said. “It was lightning fast.”

Engine’s primary concerns were achieving full coverage of their app and improving visual testing. They were running Cypress in headless mode and could perform traces but not visual diffs, leaving them without feedback loops in their design process.

Essentially, they couldn’t point to a picture and discuss it, which meant the company’s design and engineering teams had no way to collaborate before making changes to their staging and production environments.

Meticulous gave Engine the visibility into visual inconsistencies and behavioral issues, a change that proved transformative. In the final week of the pilot project, 39 out of 50 engineers surveyed—78%—reported catching a bug that they had previously struggled to detect. In addition, 92% of Hanna’s team (46 out of 50) felt their developer experience had improved.

“We were laser-focused on reducing our escaped bug rate, and the trial convinced my team and the VP of engineering that Meticulous was the right tool for the job,” Hanna said.

Bogged down by manual testing

With 300 engineers contributing to a code base, it may be easy to dismiss escaped bugs as the cost of doing business. But for Engine, the $2.1 billion travel management platform, every rogue bug could compromise the user experience.

Engine’s codebase is four years old and has grown in complexity as the company has onboarded new features, customers, and team members. Naturally, quality assurance has also become increasingly complex. The company’s Cypress testing stack suffered from common pitfalls, including a lack of ownership, high flakiness, and long runtimes.

As a result, Engine couldn’t rely on the platform to ensure consistency for their users.

Engine Principal Software Engineer Colin Hanna estimates his team addressed roughly 50 escaped bugs per month in Engine’s primary application. Due to behavioral and visual inconsistencies, these bugs required about five hours each to address, including reporting, triaging, fixing, and writing tests to prevent a recurrence.The engineering team was bogged down by manual testing and a high volume of escaped bugs, with regression rates that stalled new feature development.“Cypress Suite was underloved by our QA team,” Hanna said. “We struggled to maintain and get a good signal from it, and one of our engineers recommended a tool that would help with our testing stack.”That tool was Meticulous, and it would soon transform how Engine tests its frontend application.