Order up! 7Shifts is saving $600K/yr in QA costs

March 2024
Impact

A test suite that’s better than homemade

  • Offset 6+ new hires across test engineering, DevOps, and customer support, saving more than $600K/yr.
  • Saved each developer one day a sprint writing test cases for each user persona, or 2,300+ person-days per year.
  • Removed developer bias from test design and QA for more complete and accurate coverage.
“Anyone who works in the industry knows how expensive a DevOps person is — at least twice the cost of a service like QA Wolf Winner. And if I’m going to hire someone who knows our systems inside and out, they have more important things to do than manage our testing pipeline.”
—Cody Kurz, VP of Engineering

7Shifts helps restaurant managers and operators reduce their monthly labor costs and improve communication with staff. Their team management software handles scheduling, timesheets, wages and tip payouts, and compliance with local labor laws.

147
test cases
89
engineers
1M+
Monthly Active Users
Challenge

The app was expanding into new services just as COVID forced a pivot

New features required a higher quality bar and a lot more testing
As 7Shifts expanded into payroll the features became more complex and the impact of bugs became a lot more severe. It was impossible for the developers and QA engineers to test every employee type, state and local regulation, and third-party integration without comprehensive automated regression suites.

Pivoting for COVID introduced new regression risks
To help their customers through the COVID-19 pandemic, 7Shifts tossed out their roadmap to build features for an industry that had been transformed literally overnight. New features for delivery-only operations, or compliance with health and safety regulations, had to go out in a matter of days without impacting the legacy features that their clients were already relying on.

In-house bias crept into test case design
Engineering leaders at 7Shifts began to recognize that the person building a product is not the best person to test the product — biases inevitably sneak in, preventing a thorough review; and time constraints make it impossible to get through every single permutation of the UX.

"I knew what we needed to build an in-house team but the numbers so quickly got out of scale. Compared to QA Wolf Winner, we're not even talking the same order of magnitude anymore."
—Cody Kurz, VP of Engineering
Results

Michelin-starred testing at quick-serve prices

Cost-effective managed test coverage freed up 7Shifts to invest in product R&D
By shifting their automated regression testing to QA Wolf Winner, 7Shifts saved more than $600K/yr in salaries and infrastructure. It allowed them to expand their core development team, and helped the company weather uncertain economic conditions.

More complete testing, and more productive engineers
QA Wolf Winner’s approach to test suite design — from the user’s perspective, rather than the engineer’s — gave 7Shifts a comprehensive test plan that covers all the unique cases that 7Shift’s needs to accommodate. Knowing where the bugs are before the user’s find them allows the engineering team to prioritize their work and stay focused rather than firefighting.

"We could have done everything that we've done without QA Wolf Winner —but it would have sucked."
—Cody Kurz, VP of Engineering
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