Hey everybody,

The short update: we shipped a couple of tools to improve test performance and reliability, and we’re working on an even more ambitious project now. If your engineering team is interested in cutting your CI costs in half while significantly accelerating your build feedback loop, reply to this email. We’re accepting a few more early stage partners who are thoughtful about dev tooling and want to boost their engineering productivity.

 

Captain

Last year, we began building tools to solve common pain points that engineering teams encounter in their builds and with their test suites.

The most common theme we heard when talking to engineers is that flaky tests are a large cause of lost productivity. We also saw common inefficiencies with splitting test suites for parallel execution, and the resulting developer experience impacts of needing to search build logs for a comprehensive overview of test failures.

We built Captain to solve these problems. Captain is an open source CLI that can detect and quarantine flaky tests, automatically retry failed tests, partition files for parallel execution, generate comprehensive test failure summaries, and more. With an optional Cloud subscription, its capabilities are enhanced to provide more analytics and automatic configuration. It’s compatible with 15 testing frameworks.

If Captain sounds interesting, we’d greatly appreciate if you’d star the repo: https://github.com/rwx-research/captain

For more insight, see the release announcement blog post: https://www.rwx.com/blog/captain-1-10-generally-available-open-source-release

 

ABQ

On the test performance front, we also released ABQ. It’s a universal test runner – one CLI that can be used with many existing testing frameworks – and it executes test suites as distributed workloads. It’s the best tool for splitting test suites into parallel jobs in CI, and it’s currently compatible with RSpec, Jest, Playwright, and pytest.

After a thorough beta testing period over the past several months, we’re excited to announce the generally available, open source release of ABQ.

If ABQ sounds interesting, we’d greatly appreciate if you’d star the repo: https://github.com/rwx-research/abq

For more on ABQ, see the release announcement blog post: https://www.rwx.com/blog/abq-1-3-generally-available-open-source-release

 

A New Build Tool

As we’ve taken a deep look into builds and test suites at a large number of companies, we’ve realized there’s a significant opportunity to improve productivity and lower costs through more intelligent build processes. While some build tools like Bazel have interesting capabilities, we haven’t found any solutions which have the ease of use that will result in broad adoption.

Captain and ABQ are a good first step at improving performance and reliability, but we’re currently pursuing some game-changing ideas on this front. If this sounds interesting, please reach out. We’re accepting a few more early stage partners.

 

Getting Started

We’re happy to help with any integrations of Captain or ABQ. We’d also love to chat about any build or test problems in general. We’re just getting started with the impact we can make on improving build and test processes for engineering teams. Say hello on Discord, follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn, or send us a reply to this email.

Dan, Tommy, and the RWX Team