Case Study: GoFundMe achieves 30x faster test runs with Cypress

GoFundMe achieves 30x faster test runs with Cypress

GoFundMe’s QA team faced slow, brittle end-to-end testing with an older Selenium/PHP Webdriver/PHP Unit setup: roughly 1,000 tests took about five hours to run (necessitating overnight runs) and exhibited ~10% flakiness (~100 random failures per run). The largely nontechnical QA team needed a simpler, more reliable platform to encourage developers to write tests and to reduce test brittleness — after evaluating several options they selected Cypress (including Cypress Cloud).

By adopting Cypress and Cypress Cloud and applying best practices (mocks and stubs, smarter waiting via route aliases/assertions, custom data‑qa selectors, and moving away from the page object model), GoFundMe reduced test time from ~5 hours to ~10 minutes (30x faster), cut flaky failures from ~100 to 1–2 per run (about a 98% reduction), increased the number of developers writing tests by ~50%, and achieved a further 63% reduction in run times through parallelization — all delivered with simpler setup, better debugging, and clearer analytics from Cypress.

GoFundMe

Todd Williams

Senior QA Automation Engineer