Overall Satisfaction with CircleCI
We're an early-stage startup, and we use CircleCI to run automated tests in the cloud. In the early days, developers ran tests locally on their own development machines, but as the test suite grew, it simply took too much time. Running tests in the cloud lets us parallelize, so an hour's long test suite can run in minutes.
- High degree of parallelization, ability to run on many containers at once.
- Ability to customize the whole process through setup scripts.
- Collecting of detailed test artifacts such as screenshots.
- Really needs per-minute pricing. The static container model doesn't let us scale up/down easily.
- The web UI is finicky and constantly frustrating.
- It lets us run tests constantly in the cloud, giving us confidence in software quality.
- This has allowed us to not hire any QA or SDET staff.
- It helps developers be more productive.
It was our CTO who did the evaluation, not me, but as I recall other services weren't as parallelizable. We knew we wanted to run on many containers simultaneously for fast test results.