Shift-Left for SaaS: Getting Ahead by Thinking Ahead
Industry & Segment
ISVs & SaaS Platforms
Objective
To demonstrate how QKTech helped a SaaS organization shift quality engineering earlier in the development lifecycle, enabling faster releases, improved defect prevention, and higher release confidence without compromising reliability.
Client Overview
A San Francisco-based SaaS company focusing on workplace strategy, design, and optimization, offers an AI-driven platform that unites people, data, and processes to boost workplace productivity. As user expectations grew, the company recognized the need to improve their product quality. To provide greater value, they decided to shift from being reactive to adopting a proactive Quality Engineering (QE) approach. That’s when they partnered with QKTech to lead this transformation, helping them “shift left” and deliver more advanced products.
Strategic Imperatives and Challenges
Broadening Testing Coverage
The workplace platform lacked coverage of functional, consistency, performance, and quality criteria, including business and tech context. So, they sought to increase test coverage and accuracy to increase product quality and reliability and prevent issues from getting into production.
Improving the Documentation Process
Any support/query tickets raised by customers were manually sorted, leading to a high mean time to resolve (MTTR). To reduce MTTR and increase customer satisfaction, it was necessary to enrich documentation, FAQs, and service processes.
Eliminating Automation Debt
They wanted to reduce their automation backlog, to improve efficiency and effectiveness to optimize their workflow productivity. This would in turn help accelerate their time to market significantly.
Adopting Active Monitoring
A lack of service mapping led to unpredictable failures and inconsistent alerts. An enterprise-wide observability approach was needed, which helps to anticipate issues before they impact end-users, enhancing the customer experience.
Our Approach
QKTech collaborated closely with the client team to understand the critical challenges and recognized the need to transform DevOps and move to a shift-left quality engineering (QE) approach. The proposed strategy focused on a structured, outcome-driven QE roadmap from a thorough platform evaluation of their operations and systems.
An outcome-driven QE roadmap
- Proof of Concept (PoC) to validate project feasibility and benefits.
- Weekly and monthly stakeholder sessions for ongoing alignment and feedback.
- Redefined structures and processes to align with QE best practices.
- Monthly ‘3 Amigos’ knowledge circle for expert insights and continuous learning.
- Cultural shift to quality engineering through focused training initiatives.
QKTech’s Solution
Enhanced Testing Scope and Speed
A context-driven testing approach was adopted, with specifications established for quality gating. This ensured very comprehensive automation testing. Custom scripts were developed to enable faster test data analysis and identification of gaps in coverage, which led to a more efficient, reliable, and accelerated testing process, and improved their product velocity.
Automation Infrastructure Setup
A cloud architecture was set up using Docker for containerization and Jenkins for continuous integration and deployment. These tools optimized automation runtime and set up benchmarks comparing existing and new processes, thereby increasing efficiency.
Established QE Guidelines and Best Practices
For ensuring consistent quality throughout, we set up guidelines for quality control checkpoints, automation & coding standards, and acceptance criteria. QKTech also set up an automated CI pipeline to provide efficient integration and deployment.
AI-Driven Customer Assistance
To optimize customer support and streamline the knowledge base, we initiated a DevRev PLuG implementation. PLuG generates a knowledge graph to assess user engagement metrics, thus reducing problem-solving duration and optimizing user satisfaction.
Business Outcomes Delivered
40%
improved test coverage
81%
enhanced automation efficiency
25%
increase in user satisfaction
30%
reduced defects
60%
reduced test suite runtime
20%
shortened cycle time
What’s Next?
Data-Informed Cross-Team Perspectives
After stabilizing the quality assurance process, we integrated sales data with product engineering data. This has been giving a consolidated view into customer interactions and aids in better decision-making. The objective is to provide faster product updates and introduce new features with each release cycle—enhancing overall responsiveness to customer needs.
Customer Experience Tracking
We have proposed to the client to use DevRev’s AI capabilities to assess every phase of the customer journey. Using DevRev we will integrate marketing, sales, and product engineering data. Tangible feedback will be gathered, enabling iterative product development and ensuring new features are aligned with user needs during release cycles.
The partnership with QKTech led the SaaS workplace platform to successfully overhaul its quality management approach, resulting in a host of strategic advantages.
At QKTech, shift-left quality engineering sits under Digital Reliability, one of the six pillars of our Reliability OS for Enterprises, which helps enterprises ship AI agents and modern platforms without the risk.
Want to shift quality left in your SaaS releases? Schedule a free consultation with our quality engineering team.
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