How Engineering Teams Use Alteryx to Test and Validate New Code

[Ozzie]

Author:

Ozzie Dembowski

Role:

Software Engineer

Company:

Alteryx

Overview of Use Case

Our engineers and product managers are constantly testing new code. We require new installer often. Especially if there is a lot of work going to QA, we might need 2-3 installers per day. In the past, they had to wait for hours to get an installer with the new code, but with our Alteryx solution it only takes one minute now. Using Alteryx Designer, we created a work-around for a long process. Being able to test new code faster affects everyone and the velocity that we get features and bugs fixes out the door. 

Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve

Each time quality engineers or product managers want to test new code that goes into Alteryx we build new installers for them. This process used to take 2 to 4 hours. Our engineering team has been hard at work to try and shorten this cycle time and decouple pieces of code that don't need to be built with the installer each time new code is updated. We needed a way to build an easy app that quality engineer, developers, product managers could use to test new changes in an installed version of Alteryx without having to wait hours. 

To quote our engineering mission statement: "Continue to simplify the analytical journey by creating world-class software our customers' trust will help them drive insights in hours instead of weeks." 

Describe your working solution

We send an API request to grab a list of versioned packages of our code uploaded to JFrog Artifactory. These versions are displayed in the second part of a chained app. The user then selects the version to install and those packages will be downloaded and installed into the user machine in a matter of seconds. 

In this case, we manage versions of individual components of code in to JFrog Artifactory. We share an analytic app that lists the versions and installs the version of the package the user wants to test. 

 

Describe the benefits you have achieved

Quality engineers and product managers are not bottlenecked when changes come in fast. Instead of waiting 2-4 hours or overnight for changes to build into an installer, it now only takes 1 minute. This is massive in time savings and allows features and bug fixes to be added to the product a lot quicker. It allows us to get more into the product each quarter.