Case Study: Lightstep achieves 4x deployment velocity with Cypress

How Lightstep achieved 4x deployment velocity with Cypress

LightStep, a provider of distributed tracing and observability for complex, multi-layered architectures, was hampered by a cumbersome 35-step manual QA process that took an engineer roughly two hours per deployment. To accelerate releases and build confidence in every change, LightStep adopted Cypress for end-to-end browser test automation (using Cypress’s Test Runner and Dashboard) to replace their manual workflow.

Cypress automated LightStep’s most tedious tests, eliminated the manual QA runbook within two months, and added PR checks and parallelization by month three, with test reports posted to Slack for team visibility. The result: Cypress helped LightStep achieve dramatically faster validation (48x faster), run 8–12k tests daily across 165 tests in 36 specs, engage 80% of the engineering org, and increase to 5–8 deployments per week while boosting deployment confidence and reducing risk.

LightStep

Ted Pennings

Product Engineer