Tech4Team: Gembani proves the importance of automatic testing

Tech4team's product Arenametrix is a platform that helps improve communication between event ticket sellers and buyers. They provide tools, data analysis and cross sections of customer insights. They have offices in The Eastern United States, France and in the UK. In 2016 they began to see rapid growth in revenues. Like almost every startup in this situation, engineering was understaffed and the codebase was suffering from the cost of constant commercial experiments.

Now that they had found their market niche, it was time to shift focus to cleaning up and improving the code. They called on Gembani for help.

Engineering, under constant pressure, had not built itself a sound ecosystem. Tech4Team needed cleaner code. However, drastically modifying a non-tested codebase is not a directly viable option.

In order to enable the team to clean up the code, Gembani wrote the first automated tests. Gembani trained the team in the basics of automated testing in Ruby. This was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration. They now work together monthly to not only progress in this clean-up process but also to brainstorm and experiment along the way with team-wide input.

In collaboration with the CTO, among other things, Gembani has institutionalized a “Tech day” every other week for the engineering team to work on any problem they choose. Gembani still facilitates this day once a month to inspire engineers to work on the highest value problems. The idea is to allow engineers complete freedom and encourage senior engineers to inspire more junior engineers to solve the more core problems.

Thanks to Gembani’s pairing with the Tech4team’s engineering team, they communicate better and are much more waste conscious today. The team has also learned many daily processes consistent with industry-wide software building and testing best practices. Finally, we have solved many of our specific in-house software technical issues through implementing the results of our successful experiments conducted and perfected during our tech-days.