By James Michaelis, BMC Helix Product Manager II and Retrace Product Lead
High tech companies that use their own solutions project confidence to their customers that solutions truly work. Many teams across Stackify use Retrace internally, and my time in customer support gave me great insights into how our customers relied on Retrace to ensure applications consistently delivered a great user experience.
After three years in customer support, I moved into a quality assurance (QA) role. Testing and validating Retrace as a QA engineer, I discovered even more valuable use cases for our cornerstone solution.
Like every QA team, the goal is to consistently put out bug free, stable, and high performing releases. Gaining a deep understanding of how our customers used Retrace was a great foundation for me as I transitioned to the QA team. Here again, we relied on our own solution, monitoring Retrace with Retrace to help us meet our goals.
Every sprint or release cycle has a similar cadence:
During a deployment window, QA engineers need to confirm the successful completion of the goals of that particular sprint. We used Retrace to validate that each user story, feature improvement, and bug fix ticket was addressed before releasing code to production. A typical day validating application updates in QA went like this:
The core of my QA responsibilities, and therefore my daily workflow, consisted of planning, testing, and validating all tickets tied to a release deadline across multiple environments. Using Retrace improved the overall quality of application updates, as well as the speed of my workflow.
In fact, the entire QA team uses Retrace to evaluate new, regressed, and resolved errors across release versions and environments. Retrace uses a low-overhead, light-weight profiler, which is ideal for pre-production and production environments alike. So, the QA and operations team also used Retrace to view deployment-specific health metrics and scores tied to a release to monitor performance metrics over time in our live production environment.
The first thing our QA team would do on production deployment day is go straight to Retrace’s Error Dashboard that collects errors for our own platform.
In Retrace, errors are automatically categorized as New, Regressed, and Resolved.
On top of error categorization, Retrace also supports deployment tracking, which tells the platform when a new application changes or a release has happened. Retrace gives users additional context for quickly handling any issues that arise by separating data into user-defined environments. Deeper filtering capabilities are also available for precise monitoring and change control at these defined environment levels.
Retrace provides immediate insights into the health of every production release by combining deployment tracking and filtering all new and regressed errors. Do we see the rate of an error happening in the previous release drop off post-deployment? Do we see an introduction of a new error spiking all of a sudden? Using Retrace’s errors and deployment tracking functionality for validation testing became invaluable and instilled confidence across the team that releases were error-free and performing as designed.
Application Performance Index (Apdex) scores combined with Retrace App Score performance metrics correlate application performance to user satisfaction. Apdex is an open standard for application benchmarking and a common way to report on user experience outcomes. Stackify’s proprietary App Score is as an objective measurement of an application. Using a simple, color-coded letter grade, App Scores provide at-a-glance feedback on application quality and health.
Both were crucial to our validation process. The QA team built custom dashboards for tracking the scores of the applications and services we monitored. Used in conjunction with deployment tracking, Retrace helped the QA team quickly uncover whether anything was introduced or changed in the platform by comparing application ratings following each deployment.
The right actionable insights equip your IT team to ensure user satisfaction remains the highest it can be. And that’s what Retrace provides. Working on the QA team exposed me to additional use cases that our customers face. The insights Retrace provides, within the context of application code and the environment that code runs, helped me become a better QA engineer. Because Retrace helps any team tasked with ensuring that every application delivers a great user experience.
To see how Stackify can elevate the performance of your multiple teams in your organization, start your free Stackify Retrace trial today.
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