We recently announced the addition of our new Associate Vice President of Innovation, Robin Gupta, to the Provar team, our exciting foray into ProvarLabs, an incubation center for innovation within Provar. It’s safe to say that we’re leaning into one of our fundamental values – innovation – and are looking toward the future.
To kickstart ProvarLabs, Robin spearheaded our first internal Hackathon, an event where employees came together to focus and collaborate on improving or creating a usable piece of software or service. We designed the Hackathon to promote team building, reinvigorate work, meet new people, and drive innovation forward. As the event concluded, it was clear that it achieved much more than that. Despite operational and vendor issues, bad weather, and spotty internet, participants built new friendships, enjoyed friendly competition, and experienced plenty of fun and laughter.
ProvarLabs’ first Hackathon consisted of 40+ participants from Provar, 4 semi-final teams, and 2 winners. A big congratulations to teams Binary Souls and Dad.Under.Test for their winning ideas!
There were limited parameters to keep innovation at its height, but all submissions were expected to adhere to the following:

This “Mission to M.A.R.S,” outlined further in our recent blog post, is the crux of the ProvarLabs initiative. With each innovation, we focus on these core values to ensure we’re heading in the right direction, and we’re proud that our community, technology, and future goals are in alignment.
As a result, the Binary Souls team won first prize by developing an innovative solution to ingest logs from multiple points into a real-time analytics engine. This enabled data visualizations for our customers and offered real-time monitoring and observability of tests for our users.
In addition, the Dad Under Test team secured the second prize for creating a plugin that simplifies the CI/CD configuration of Provar tests for our users.
Lastly, the People’s Choice Award was given to the Provar Xperts team, who developed a Google Chrome plugin that accurately generates web element locators for automation test cases.
The Process
This Hackathon quickly rocketed to the moon, beginning on July 28th and concluding on August 2nd. Teams began forming on June 17th and had until July 8th to register officially. Between then and July 29th, the countdown was on!
Those selected to move on to the semi-finals each made three-minute presentations of their demos and answered two minutes of questions. On a scale of 1 to 10, they were rated on the following:
- The novelty of the idea
- Completeness of the solution
- Presentation/pitch
- Relevance to the theme and Salesforce/Provar ecosystem
From there, four teams moved to the final round, making five-minute pitches and engaging in another two minutes of Q&A. On August 2nd, the winners were notified, and the winning ideas were moved into the planning stage.
We will soon launch the Hackathon submissions as innovative prototypes for our users to improve the reliability and scalability of their test cases.
The Future
What’s next for ProvarLabs (other than more Hackathons, of course!)? Here’s a glimpse of strategic initiatives within ProvarLabs:
- Launch moon-shot projects and embrace failures. Innovation is about experimentation and thinking big. We will explore technologies like AI, blockchain, cloud, and edge computing to launch ambitious projects for our customers.
- Manage innovation maturity. We will handle innovation as a portfolio, ensuring a smooth process from ideation to delivery and support.
- Foster a culture of innovation. We will nurture innovation as part of our culture. We will use tools like design thinking, brown bag sessions, and Hackathons.
- We will promote innovation inside and outside the organization. We will encourage innovation among team members, the community, and users. This approach will help us innovate decentralized, openly, and transparently.
These team photos take you behind the scenes of ProvarLabs’ first Hackathon! We look forward to sharing more ProvarLabs initiatives with you as we continue driving innovation.
To learn more about current career opportunities with ProvarLabs, including our open Business System Analyst and Senior R&D Engineer roles, visit Provar’s hiring page. Interested in running your own Hackathon? Connect with our team today for ideas on getting started!