Cera Care launched in 2016 with the goal to revolutionize home healthcare. The company moves services – such as care, nursing telehealth, and repeat medications – out of hospitals and into the comfort of your own home.
By using technology, Cera Care keeps people healthier in their own homes for longer.
"We provide healthcare in the home. The mission of the company is to keep people healthy in the home for as long as possible using technology,” said Lewis Prescott, Quality Assurance Lead at Cera Care. The idea is we’re building applications our care coordinators can use, while providing technology that helps our patients live healthier, longer lives."
Since launching in 2016, Cera Care has grown exponentially. While the growth of a company can be exciting, it doesn’t come without obstacles.
"The growing nature of the company was one of our biggest challenges,” says Prescott. “We had acquired other companies, which added to our growing platform, but we had to build on a legacy system that was never made to scale the way we did.”
Making the switch in the face of scale
The scaling nature of the business, coupled with the need to integrate and deliver features rapidly, meant existing technologies struggled to keep up. This played a key factor in eroding the confidence amongst teams.
“The way I described our need for a new tool to management was that we had zero confidence in our integrations. We were mocking everything,” said Prescott. “We were not doing any live testing, so we weren’t confident" in the integrations. We needed to build that confidence, and contract testing is where we started.”
Not only were teams lacking confidence, but they were also blocked from using consumer-driven contract testing.
“We weren’t using contract testing because the internal framework we had was looking to run the API locally,” said Prescott. “We couldn’t intercept any of the middleware or anything like that.”
Once made aware of the bi-directional contract testing capability released in 2022, Prescott immediately jumped to use PactFlow. He was especially intrigued that it helped find and fix integration errors sooner and streamlined collaboration.
“We were not doing any live testing, so we weren’t confident in the integrations. We needed to build that confidence, and contract testing is where we started.”
The importance of bi-directional contract testing
Bi-directional contract testing was an important feature to Cera Care because they use a design-first approach with their APIs.
“Using existing OpenAPI specs was a game changer because we could simply point our tests to the OAS and have that verification applied,” said Prescott. “By creating the contracts, we would know if we had to make changes going forward and could confirm whether were breaking the apps as we went along.”
Working across two systems is where contract testing also really added value.
A new understanding of how to integrate smoothly
Implementing contract tests gave Prescott’s team the ability to understand how the integrations would work between the systems.
“In the non-legacy part of the systems, the new features, we were using Playwright or Cypress to implement those end scenarios.
We had a sliver of end-to-end tests for the end-toend journeys. However, for certain legacy systems we were stubbing out all the integrations, so they weren’t truly end-to-end. This meant that those E2E tests were becoming increasingly flaky and unstable,” said Prescott.
“Again, we had to add contract testing to improve that flow.”
This presented a prime opportunity to revisit the suites with a contract testing lens, shifting left, ultimately decreasing execution times and restoring confidence in the end-to-end suite.
Easy decision, easy implementation
PactFlow provides an affordable solution without the hassle of hosting, with features that make implementing quick and easy. When bi-directional contract testing came out, we piloted it with one team. The learning curve was not difficult. We had a self-contained system which didn’t have any dependencies, and we were able to apply it easily,” said Prescott.
“We then rolled it out across multiple other teams. These ones had integrations with the mobile app so we could add to it. That was a game changer.”
The integration ability within PactFlow doubled as a game-changer for Cera Care.
“The ability for us to switch on SSO integration with Google meant the maintenance for me of onboarding new members was nothing. It seamlessly integrates with our CI systems,” said Prescott. “We didn’t have to worry about any of self-hosting or sending messages across from a self-hosted solution.”
Once PactFlow was implemented, Cera Care could focus more on the big picture: its core mission of revolutionizing care at home.