The Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) is a non-profit organization dedicated to finding a cure for Parkinson's disease and significantly improving the lives of people with Parkinson's. It achieves this by aggressively funding promising research and ensuring the development of better therapies for those affected by Parkinson's. The MJFF website, MichaelJFox.org, serves as a critical communication platform for the Foundation, educating the Parkinson's patient and caregiver community about the disease, showcasing ongoing research funded by the Foundation, and facilitating fundraising initiatives.
When MJFF relaunched its website on Drupal in 2019, the in-house team was relatively new to the platform. They needed the expertise to increase development velocity and decrease the QA time required for each new deployment.
Through automated testing, deployment previews, and scripted deployments with logs, we helped MJFF realize these goals and reduced manual QA time by six hours per release.
Faster verification of bug fixes and new features
We set up pull request previews with Tugboat to enable quick testing and verification of all bug fixes, new features, and maintenance updates. These previews make it possible to catch visual regressions before reaching the test server.
Reducing QA time with end-to-end automated testing
MJFF's development team spent eight hours on manual QA tasks per deployment. Even something as routine as security updates became a day-long endeavor for MJFF.
We implemented a suite of Cypress.io end-to-end tests through GitHub Actions, which covers the most critical functionality of the website. As a result, we reduced the QA time by six hours per deployment, making it easier to keep the website up-to-date.
Leveraging extensive real-world Drupal expertise
Developing with Drupal's best practices and automation streamlines the development process and boosts a team's overall productivity. This approach minimizes technical debt and simplifies future maintenance tasks while enhancing the velocity of developers in implementing new features.
We continue collaborating with the MJFF team to ensure deployments are consistent and frequent, manual QA time remains low, and the MJFF website is up-to-date with current best practices.
Lullabot’s support team has significantly boosted our productivity by cutting our deployment time from approximately six hours to just two. I also now have peace of mind that our website won’t be negatively impacted in the process.
Project credits
The following people contributed to the success of this project.
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Cathy Theys
Support Team Manager
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David Burns
VP of Extended Support
Services
We provided the following kinds of services to help this project succeed.
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Drupal Development
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Drupal Site Building
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Support & Maintenance
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System Administration