Arctype debuted on Product Hunt in December 2021 after two years of building. Fast-forward to October 2022, and Arctype is already acquired by ClickHouse, one of the most promising database companies.
This rapid success wouldn’t have been possible without Arctype’s ongoing commitment to improving the product’s quality. Arctype has chosen QAwerk as their trusted QA partner, and we’re proud to see the results of our joint effort.
In this article, we’ll talk about Arctype, its cooperation with QAwerk, and results Arctype has achieved thanks to prioritizing software quality.
Arctype joined ClickHouse
ClickHouse announced Arctype’s IP and team acquisition, along with making its cloud offering available to the general public, on December 5, 2022. Before we jump into the acquisition part, let’s define what each company does.
What is Arctype?
Arctype is a fast and easy-to-use SQL client and database management tool for developers and teams. Arctype simplifies work with databases and makes it fun in several ways.
For example, SQL autocomplete allows writing queries faster, whereas building attention-grabbing charts is possible with just two clicks. Arctype also offers collaboration features, such as inviting other experts to workspaces or sharing links to charts and queries with teammates.
We rebuilt Arctype inside the new ClickHouse Cloud 😀https://t.co/v5k5VVBVnH pic.twitter.com/mx1aTczUTZ
— Justin de Guzman (@defaultalive) December 6, 2022
Prior to the acquisition, Arctype was available for web, macOS, Linux, and Windows users and integrated with MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, PlanetScale, YugabyteDB, and ClickHouse. It reached its end of life on December 6, 2022.
Learn more about Arctype, its startup journey & evolution, and the team behind it from our tech talk with Zach Naimon, Product Manager at Arctype.
How QAwerk contributed to Arctype’s success
The Arctype founding, engineering, and product team did a tremendous job of finding the product-market fit and further polishing the software based on the feedback of thousands of developers and non-technical users relying on it day-to-day.
Another smart thing they did was they hired QAwerk, delegating all of their QA worries to someone with years of experience under their belt. We don’t like to blow our own horn, but every other startup we work with has either received a prestigious award and grown a customer base or got acquired by a market leader.
Quality assurance matters and businesses that get it are always winners. Here is how we helped the Arctype team achieve their milestones faster.
Stronger Team
As an ambitious and fast-growing startup, Arctype strived to roll out new features frequently and consistently. At the same time, as the product became more complicated and the number of interfaces and potential user flows grew, it became challenging for them to handle all of that internally without compromising the quality.
Arctype was looking for an experienced QA partner who could thoroughly check every build, preventing bugs from making their way into prod and ensuring no new bugs are introduced along with upgrades. And QAwerk is more than capable of doing that.
QAwerk, a Ukrainian agency, kept delivering despite the war, freeing Arctype from QA troubles and helping them carve out time for the big picture stuff.
“I really like working with every member of the QAwerk team, everyone is super friendly and responsive, they’re very flexible, and they work with us even when there are a lot of moving pieces up in the air. When we need last minute test runs, they are always happy to accommodate us. In addition to that, we really like the attention to detail that the QAwerk team applies when they’re conducting these test runs.
I found that Ukrainian people in general are incredibly hard-working, and strong-willed, and also very passionate about supporting their country during these difficult times, so if anything, I think businesses should hire more Ukrainian QA engineers,”
Faster Time to Market
One of the most important milestones Arctype hoped to achieve together with QAwerk is reaching a weekly deploy cadence.
The time difference between North America and Ukraine allows us to speed up the development cycle through overnight testing. So when it was time for Arctype’s developers to log off and rest, it was daytime here in Ukraine, and our QA engineers began testing. As a result, bug reports were available first thing in the morning, and developers could start fixing bugs right away; no time was wasted on awaiting feedback.
Another thing that helped us increase test coverage and time to market is test automation. We firmly believe combining manual and automated tests brings the best results.
“Our test suite contains almost 300 test cases at this point, and it takes about 8 hours to go through a single QA test run. That being said, it’s very important that there’s a concerted effort to make sure that even the smallest bugs are identified, and the QAwerk team does a fantastic job,”
Improved Stability & Performance
For a database management solution, stability and performance are paramount and foundational to the project’s success. That’s why QAwerk’s testing strategy heavily emphasized these aspects.
Besides the absolute must-haves like functional, regression, and integration testing, we also conducted smoke testing to quickly validate if the build is stable and worth checking further and negative testing to future-proof the app against unwanted input and improper user behavior.
At that time, Arctype was a cross-platform tool, so we also performed installation testing to eliminate friction points during the download, installation, and update steps.
“The QAwerk team have been one of our favorite vendors at Arctype. They help keep our app stable and are extremely responsive and thorough,”
Better User Retention
Stability and performance and directly intertwined with user adoption and retention. So it’s only natural that keeping your app healthy will positively impact consumer loyalty and satisfaction.
When testing products, our QA engineers always factor in usability, reporting on areas that can be optimized and suggesting ways to achieve that. We draw on our abundant experience in testing SaaS solutions from other industries and share examples of successful implementation for similar functionalities.
“The primary source of churn by far, as we’ve discovered with Arctype, but I think even more broadly for any software-as-a-service product, is when users encounter bugs, stability and performance issues in an application. So anything you can do to mitigate the number of bugs and issues that make their way into production deploy will have a direct impact on adoption and retention of users. For that reason investing in QA is absolutely a value add for us.”
Work with Ukraine
Arctype is one of those forward-looking, brave-hearted, and incredibly supportive clients who continued partnering with QAwerk even after russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. We adapted and quickly restored our pre-war delivery schedule, helping keep Arctype stable and well-polished.
That being said, we want other foreign businesses to follow suit. Hiring a Ukrainian vendor is not an act of philanthropy. Ukrainians are willing to work, and they’ll get the job done because that is what allows us to hold our economic front and support our defenders.
If you are looking for a software testing partner, our QA team would love to help. Also, be sure to request a case study below if you’d like to learn even more about our contribution to Arctype.
See how we helped Arctype increase stability & performance and speed up releases by 20%
