Evolution of quality at Grab

Summary

As Grab expanded its superapp, manual QA sign-offs led to prolonged testing cycles and a peak in major production defects around 2019. To counter defect leakage and improve delivery pace, the engineering organization transitioned to a shift-left testing strategy across its software development lifecycle. Quality engineers began writing Given/When/Then acceptance tests prior to coding so that software engineers could execute them during development, accompanied by Definition of Ready and Definition of Done standards. The team also structured a multi-layer test strategy spanning unit tests, pipeline-executed UI component tests with mocked APIs, backend integration tests, and a custom internal end-to-end framework. Between 2019 and 2022, these changes reduced major and critical production issues by 60% and development-phase critical bugs by 40%.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Standardizing acceptance criteria in a Given/When/Then format allowed QA engineers to draft test cases before development began for software engineers to execute directly during coding.

2. 2

   The updated Definition of Done for new features mandated at least 70% test coverage for UI component tests run with mocked API responses in CI pipelines.

3. 3

   Between 2019 and 2022, shifting testing left decreased major and critical production bugs by 60% and development-phase critical bugs by 40%.