4x,
Moving an omnichannel retailer from monthly to weekly releases
CI/CD and test automation for an omnichannel retailer's e-commerce platform.
The context
The retailer's e-commerce platform shipped once a month, in a release that took a full weekend and a code freeze for the week before. Regression testing was manual: a team of testers worked through about 900 scripted cases, and anything found late pushed the whole release back.
Trading could not be interrupted, and the busiest weeks of the year were off limits for change. The in-house engineering team wanted to keep ownership of the platform, so whatever we built had to be something they could run, read and extend alongside us.
What we did
- 1
Triage the regression suite
We reviewed all 900 manual test cases with the retailer's product owners. About a third were duplicates or covered retired features; the rest were ranked by revenue risk, starting with search, basket and checkout.
- 2
Automate the critical paths
We automated the ranked cases in Playwright for the storefront and as contract tests for the order and stock APIs. The suite runs in parallel on every merge and finishes in under twenty minutes.
- 3
Build the pipeline
We rebuilt the CI/CD pipeline in GitHub Actions with trunk-based development, feature flags and automated deployments to staging. Production releases go out behind a canary with automatic rollback on error-rate or checkout-conversion alerts.
- 4
Overlap and handovers
Our offshore pod overlaps the in-house team's mornings, so overnight build and test failures are already triaged when they start. A written handover closes every shift, covering open defects, flaky tests and release readiness.
The result
4x.
More frequent releases
Releases became four times as frequent, moving from monthly to weekly, measured across the six months after go-live against the year before. The weekend release and the week-long code freeze have gone; a release now takes under an hour during trading hours.
Faster releases did not cost stability. Escaped defects reaching production fell by half over the same period, and the in-house engineers spend their time on features rather than regression runs. The suite grows with every story we ship.
- regression cases automated
- 600
- full regression run on every merge
- 20 min
- fewer escaped defects per release
- 50%
“We went from monthly to weekly releases. Their offshore team overlaps our mornings, and their shift handovers are tighter than most in-house teams manage.”
Michael GrantHead of Technology, a fashion retailerHave a number you need to move?
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