Key outcomes
- 77% faster deployment cycles, down from a month to one day
- 60% reduction in testing cycle time, with a 100% pass rate
- 2,000 hours a year of engineering managers’ time freed for innovation
Delivering unique gaming experiences to millions of customers
Founded as a single betting shop in 1967, Betfred Group has grown to become one of the world’s leading privately-owned betting and gaming businesses, operating with over 1,300 betting shops.
As a pioneer in gaming technology, Betfred also offers online gaming to millions of active customers. Its proprietary platform enables it to deliver outstanding betting and gaming experiences for customers worldwide. But with innovation at the core of its mission, Betfred is always looking for ways to make the platform work even harder to support the continued global growth of the business.
So, after identifying an opportunity to increase the speed and quality of software releases on the platform, Betfred partnered with Thoughtworks to help modernize and enhance its approach.
Challenge: Manual testing slows release cycles and impedes innovation
The stability of Betfred’s platform is fundamental to its brand reputation; customer trust is essential in the hyper-competitive betting and gaming market. So, its engineering teams took a rigorous approach to testing code before releasing it to production. However, this approach involved a huge amount of manual effort based around an end-to-end test suite, with code often taking over a month to reach production.
While Betfred could deploy certain independent features via standalone releases, their primary bottleneck was the core platform. They knew they needed a way to accelerate and automate key software delivery processes for these massive platform-wide releases, whilst simultaneously enhancing release confidence. It was vital that increasing the speed of the core platform could not compromise quality or stability.
Betfred chose to partner with Thoughtworks because of our proven experience across the betting and gaming ecosystem, including work with operators and providers, and our ability to combine deep domain knowledge with modern software delivery expertise. That combination helped Betfred accelerate key regulatory and platform initiatives while improving release speed, quality and engineering effectiveness.
Solution: Enhancing automated release processes and defining a modern testing strategy
Thoughtworks began by conducting value stream mapping of the entire development process, from ideation through deployment to ongoing support. Bringing all Betfred’s engineering leaders together for this exercise was also crucial to align everyone on the shared objectives and release strategy. With multiple teams working on the platform, this was vital for the success of the new approach.
After mapping the software delivery value stream, the Thoughtworks team collaborated with Betfred’s tech leadership to identify and implement the two opportunities that would have the most significant and immediate impact, prioritizing a shared approach to solving these challenges together:
Optimize the release and deployment pipeline: Moving away from the painful process of cherry-picking individual services and packages, Thoughtworks guided Betfred to automate large parts of the deployment process, consolidate into a single pipeline view, and deploy all services together in every release, bringing consistency, stability and speed.
Rationalize and modernize the automated testing strategy: Betfred already possessed high levels of automation, but the massive automated test suite had become fragile and difficult to trust. Rather than focusing purely on test execution speed, Thoughtworks helped implement a balanced test pyramid, transitioned to modern API tests and created reusable frameworks. This eliminated waste and cut down the lengthy triage time previously spent determining if a release was actually safe to proceed.
With such a major shift, it was essential that every team was on board with the changes. So, Thoughtworks conducted a small, controlled exemplar project, allowing the team to learn, course-correct and prove value before expanding the approach throughout the business.
As well as defining and implementing the release strategy, the Thoughtworks team trained Betfred’s engineers on the new approach and helped its engineering leaders prioritize the right things to accelerate and automate. Now, Betfred’s teams can continue improving their software delivery effectiveness and take ownership of their engineering transformation.
The new strategy has transformed how we think about releases, both in terms of speed and quality. It’s also enhanced our teams’ efficiency and effectiveness, allowing us to continuously evolve our platform while improving its stability. Our engineering teams can devote more of their time to bringing great ideas to life, so by improving the developer experience, we’re also improving the experiences we offer our customers.
Outcomes: Faster, more confident releases and more time for innovation
Betfred has now reduced its deployment cycles from a month to a day. Release testing cycle time has shrunk by 60%, and the new testing strategy has increased confidence, accelerating validation execution by 78% and reducing triage time by 78%.
For the engineering team leaders and senior technologists among all teams, the huge reduction in manual effort has freed 2,000 hours of their time each year. Time they can now spend on enhancing the platform and delivering new features and products, without worrying that releases will impact stability or the customer experience.
The impact of the new release strategy was reflected in stronger platform stability and performance during peak demand periods. By improving the reliability of releases and reducing operational risk, Betfred was better positioned to handle high traffic volumes while maintaining a more consistent experience for customers.
While Thoughtworks and Betfred will continue collaborating to improve software delivery effectiveness, the business has bold plans for the future, focusing on scaling its proprietary platform to support higher betting volumes and maximizing the potential of its internal technology.
We’ve put a huge amount of time and effort into building a one-of-a-kind gaming platform. Now, our partnership with Thoughtworks enables us to redirect our efforts away from maintaining the status quo and toward delivering innovations and enhancements. We can innovate with confidence that the platform will remain stable, and that makes it much easier to outflank our competitors and deliver the unique, engaging, and reliable customer experiences that will fuel our future growth.
