How Tennis & Padel Vlaanderen Rethought Software Testing
When Flanders’ second-largest sports federation outgrew manual QA, a structured modernization gave them a clear path to scalable, AI-assisted software quality.
The Problem Every Growing Digital Platform Faces
More than 200,000 members. Over 520 clubs. More than 4 million court reservations processed through a single mobile app… and counting.
Tennis & Padel Vlaanderen’s digital platform has become mission-critical infrastructure for Flemish sport. But behind the scenes, the federation’s testing practice hadn’t kept pace with its platform’s growth. Testing was largely manual. There was little documented test baseline. And almost every test case lived in exactly one place: one person’s memory.
“Almost all test cases were in my head,” says Joannes Delputte, Product Owner at Tennis & Padel Vlaanderen. “But as our platform grew, that simply became unmanageable.” (visit brightest.be for the full statement)
It’s one of the most common and most dangerous patterns in software quality. For a federation handling court reservations, member management, club administration, and competition systems across Flanders, that’s a risk.
A Staged Approach: Assess First, Automate Second
Tennis & Padel Vlaanderen’s path to modern QA began not with a tool purchase, but with a conversation. Through their CTO, the federation connected with Brightest, which is also the Belgian software quality company behind SQAI Suite, and what followed set the tone for everything that came after.
“After the first contact and the proposed approach, we immediately felt: this isn’t about selling something, but about genuinely helping us move forward,” Delputte recalls.
The engagement unfolded in pragmatic, team-sized steps.
Step 1: The BrightScan Diagnostic
Before writing a single test script, Brightest ran a QA maturity assessment — a BrightScan — to map where test knowledge was concentrated, where coverage gaps created business risk, and where automation would deliver the fastest return.
“The BrightScan brought structure and confirmed several things we had already sensed,” says Delputte. “It gave us a clear roadmap to evolve towards higher test maturity.”
This is the right starting point for any organization in a similar position. A diagnostic surfaces the real problems — not just the visible symptoms — and prevents teams from automating bad processes at scale.
Step 2: On-Demand Coaching, Not a Heavy Program
Rather than enrolling in a fixed, months-long consulting engagement, Tennis & Padel Vlaanderen opted for flexible coaching sessions scheduled when the team actually needed them.
“It’s very practical: no heavy, long-term programs, just support at the right moment. That allows us to move forward step by step, at our own pace,” Delputte explains.
This model respects bandwidth. QA transformation fails when it demands more from teams than they can absorb. Incremental, need-based coaching keeps momentum without overwhelming delivery schedules.
Step 3: Building the Foundation of a Test-Automation Framework
With a clearer picture of their test landscape, the team began laying the foundations of a Brightest test-automation framework — structured, repeatable, and no longer dependent on what any one person happened to remember.
“Our first experiences are positive,” Delputte notes. “We clearly see its added value.”
Step 4: Introducing SQAI Suite as the AI Accelerator
This is where the modernization shifted from structural to transformational.
“Through Brightest, we also got to know SQAI Suite,” says Delputte. “It’s a big advantage that our consultant understands what it is and how it can help us. That way, it doesn’t remain a separate initiative, but truly becomes part of how we further develop our testing.”
That last point matters enormously. AI tooling introduced in isolation — without the context of a broader QA strategy — tends to remain a novelty. Embedded within a structured approach and guided by someone who understands both the tool and the team, it compounds.
Why SQAI Suite Is Built for This Exact Problem
The scenario Tennis & Padel Vlaanderen faced — test knowledge trapped in one person’s head, manual processes unable to keep pace with a growing platform, no documented or repeatable baseline — is precisely what SQAI Suite’s Virtual Test Engineer (VTE) is designed to solve.
The VTE is an AI agent that orchestrates multiple large language models and tools to automate the most time-consuming testing tasks:
- Requirements to test cases — Convert documentation and user stories into structured, testable assets in minutes, not days.
- Automation script generation — Generate and maintain test scripts for your existing stack (Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, and more), including custom frameworks.
- Test data generation — Produce realistic, edge-case-covering test data without manual effort.
- Centralized test knowledge — Eliminate the single point of failure. Test cases live in a shared, maintainable system — not in anyone’s memory.
SQAI Suite is tool-agnostic and integrates with the platforms teams already use — Jira, Confluence, GitLab, Zephyr, Azure DevOps, and others — so adoption doesn’t require ripping out existing infrastructure. It’s built for EU data sovereignty and security by default, which matters for organizations handling member data at scale.
Across its customer base, SQAI Suite helps companies reduce QA costs by up to 60% and accelerate releases by at least 50%.
What Changed for Tennis & Padel Vlaanderen
The federation moved from a fragile, person-dependent testing approach to a documented roadmap, structured QA processes, and the first working foundations of test automation.
The qualitative shift is captured in how Delputte describes the working relationship: “Communication runs smoothly and we get quick answers to our questions. There’s little fluff. They immediately look at how we work and what works best for us.”
Tennis & Padel Vlaanderen is now also featured as a reference customer on the SQAI Suite platform alongside organizations including HeadIT, EverESSt, and many others.
Key Takeaways for QA and Engineering Leaders
If your organization is facing a similar situation — undocumented changes, test cases, manual testing that can’t scale with release velocity, or knowledge concentrated in one or two individuals — this case points to a clear path:
Start with a diagnostic, not a tool. Understand where your coverage gaps and knowledge risks actually are before investing in automation.
Use AI to externalize and scale test knowledge. SQAI Suite turns fragmented information into requirements, documented test cases and working automation scripts — removing the single point of failure that underpins most QA fragility.
Match the pace of change to your team’s bandwidth. On-demand coaching via Brightest and incremental framework build-out consistently outperform heavy, front-loaded transformation programs.
Validate ROI before scaling. SQAI Suite offers a 6-week proof of concept, giving QA teams direct access to the platform to measure impact against their own baseline before committing to full deployment.
Ready to Take QA Out of Anyone’s Head?
If your platform has grown faster than your testing has, you’re not alone — and you don’t need to wait for a production incident to act.
