About the company 

Originating in New York more than two centuries ago, this American global investment bank and financial services company has built a strong presence in almost 180 countries and regions via local banking operations. The institution has expanded its international reach by providing diverse services, including banking, credit cards, wealth management, securities trading, treasury management, asset management, private equity, and index funds.

The Challenge 

The team responsible for the in-house, home-grown testing framework and operational efficiency at the Bank frequently faces significant challenges in managing extensive compilations and unit tests. They assist quantitative developers in building comprehensive libraries of these tests, developed in C++, and mapped to various functions, along with performing instrumented weekly builds requiring considerable computational resources and time.

Quant developers must run unit tests locally before each pull request, which tends to extend the testing cycle. Approximately 150,000 unit test cases are executed daily in the Continuous Integration (CI) environment with close to 2 million tests conducted. A single regression test requires about 700 CPU hours to complete, resulting in nearly two full days to finish a testing cycle. This delay ultimately hampers developer productivity. Given the complexity of managing the entire process, the testing team decided to partner with Incredibuild to expedite execution and improve workflow efficiency.

“We’ve benefited greatly from using Incredibuild to accelerate the distribution of our compilations and unit tests, which can be quite labor-intensive. The results we achieve with Incredibuild are very satisfying.”

How Incredibuild Helped 

After adopting Incredibuild, the team experienced impressive results almost immediately. They were able to run their 120,000 regression tests in about an hour and twenty minutes, a task that previously required several days. Additionally, they enhanced compilation times, enhancing both developer productivity and efficiency. This substantial reduction in testing time made their workflow much smoother, allowing developers to concentrate on their work instead of waiting for results and allowing faster corrections to bugs due to the shoetenrd feedback loop. With about 300 users currently utilizing Incredibuild, the number is anticipated to grow steadily.

Bottom Line 

Incredibuild has helped the financial institution dramatically reduce testing times, slashing feedback time to developers, increasing productivity and helping developers focus more on delivery and innovation. This partnership not only created immediate efficiency gains, it also opened doors to future opportunities and new technical solutions based on collaboration with Incredibuild’s team.

95.8% decrease