Kantox releases code once a week with Semaphore instead of once every three months
😔 Before Semaphore:
- ⛔️️ Lack of a reliable and easy to use CI tool
- ⛔️ Too much time wasted on waiting for tests to be completed
😄 After adopting Semaphore:
- ✅ 10 times more frequent releases
- ✅ Test time reduced by 150% with parallel testing
Discover what Semaphore can do for your team 🧑💻
The Challenge
As a FinTech company, it is important for Kantox to add more value every week by releasing new features, while also making absolutely sure that every part of their platform works as expected at any given time.
To ensure this, the development team at Kantox required an easy-to-use, reliable solution for running their test suite continuously. The solution needed to allow them to improve the speed of their tests in order to keep up with the growth of their test suite, without wasting resources on maintaining testing infrastructure.
The Solution
As the Kantox platform grew, the team needed to adopt new tools to help them collaborate on building it faster and with confidence that everything is working as expected. Back in 2013, Kantox started using Semaphore for continuous integration to speed up delivering new features. Practicing continuous delivery helped them with developing a highly reliable FinTech platform that adds more value to their customers on a regular basis.
For the Kantox QA team, it was also important to have a continuous integration tool that is straightforward and easy to use. They didn’t want to have an army of people working to maintain their CI. Semaphore’s hosted CI was the perfect solution, since the infrastructure is already in place, and handling everything is simple and easy.
“Using Semaphore is very straightforward, it’s incredibly helpful that it’s easy to set up and you don’t have to worry about installing, configuring or maintaining servers and Jenkins instances. It’s all working out of the box, so that lets us focus on writing code and building great FX products.”
Alfredo Lopez, QA Manager at Kantox
Another issue that most development teams face is that, as they keep adding more tests, the test suite keeps getting slower. The Kantox team resolved this issue by putting parallel tests to use, and splitting up their test commands on Semaphore into multiple jobs. This reduced their testing time by 150%. It also helped the team group tests and tag them in order to differentiate between unit and integration level tests.
The Results
For Kantox, it is extremely important to be able to continuously build and test their platform reliably, quickly, and with ease. Using Semaphore allows the Kantox team to stop worrying about CI and CD, and focus on their goals to bring more value to their clients and redefine the FinTech industry.
“We used to have releases once in every two to three months, and now we release once a week. Continuously running our tests on Semaphore helps us speed up delivering new features, because it provides us with confidence and feedback that everything is working as expected. We can create more value, and be confident we are not breaking anything.”
Alfredo Lopez, QA Manager at Kantox
Headquartered in London, Kantox is a multinational fintech company offering foreign exchange management solutions. Their technological solutions allow international companies to solve one of their major problems — currency management. Since 2011, Kantox’s 2,000 clients from various industries have exchanged over 3 billion US dollars in 20 countries.
www.kantox.com/ 
Industry
Financial technology
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