“Robofy us.”

The story I heard in my job interview was common yet intriguing: The company had grown from a one-man basement operation to be the market leader in direct-to-consumer sales for wineries. But with well over $1 billion of transactional volume flowing through every year, the company’s system had developed chronic pains in architecture, infrastructure, and code quality. What’s more, any progress was limited by a bottleneck of a single person testing everything by hand.

I was asked to build out a functioning QA unit and start the company on a test automation program. Two years in, we can now take stock and share our experiences. What we found out is that small is beautiful, cheap is good, and cultural change matters.