Berkley Lights | Adtechcorp

Project Brief

Berkeley Lights is a California-based company developing technologies in the forms of platforms and workflows to enable cell-by-cell selection and manipulation to allow for antibody discovery, and engineering for personalized therapies. Its technologies are designed to accelerate cell-based scientific discovery i.e., early detection of cancer through their digital cell biology technology. The company has developed an innovative software known as Cell Analysis Suite (CAS™) 2.1 to streamline the process of cell testing. To help the company’s proprietary software achieve this goal and to hasten the testing process, Adtech was onboarded as a technology partner to help facilitate the creation of an automation suite for the same.

Problem Area

Major changes to the CASS software resulted in timelines getting stretched and the existing software getting reworked to accommodate the automation suite

Facilities

Reduced user touchpoints and increased user interface efficiency
Helped cut down the cell testing process from three weeks to one week
Reduces user touchpoints, introduces key improvements to the user interface, and provides new functions to ensure that workflows run more efficiently.

The situation

Challenges faced

We had a lot of dependencies on the Berkley Lights team owing to the fact that the CASS software had to be repurposed to accommodate a few of the test cases that were being automated. This resulted in the timeline getting stretched but not to an unreasonable extent.

The situation

Our approach

The client was clear on what exactly needed to get done and hence had already drafted the test cases that were numbered around 200. Adtech was given the herculean task of automating them to ensure that the software runs seamlessly.

To kickstart the project we followed the scrum model where we could discuss the requirements and challenges on an agile basis. We had daily scrum calls for 15 to 20 minutes to deal with problems that would arise and to keep track of the progress made on the test cases. The adoption of the scrum model and the CI/CD helped us maintain the weekly release ratio of the automation test cases.

And within 3 months were able to automate nearly all the test cases given to us by the Berkley Lights teams. The automated test cases have strongly been integrated into the CAS software and as a result it has been effectively able to reduce user touchpoints, introduce key improvements to the user interface, and provide new functions to ensure that the workflows run more efficiently.