Case Study: PlanGrid achieves 75% faster test runs and developer-owned QA with Cypress

From Selenium to Cypress Revolutionizing Testing Practices at AutoDesk’s PlanGrid

PlanGrid, an AutoDesk company, provides construction productivity software used across millions of projects. Its six‑person Automation Platform team inherited a disorganized Selenium test suite of roughly 50 tests that were hard to debug and often skipped by developers, creating a culture and scalability challenge as the product and user base grew. After evaluating options, PlanGrid selected Cypress as its JavaScript‑based testing tool to modernize test practices.

Using Cypress, PlanGrid built a faster, more maintainable test ecosystem—adding an internal library with 20+ custom commands, enabling parallelization that cut test run times by 75%, and running about 430k automated tests per month. Cypress’s real‑time running, DOM snapshotting, and debugging features helped developers own and fix their tests, supported PlanGrid’s microservice architecture, and shifted the organization toward higher-quality, faster delivery.

PlanGrid

Prakash Patel

Senior Manager, SDET