Key Success Outcomes
Here's where Cloud Elements saw the most impact.
Save 50 minutes per day
Improved bug reporting efficiency
Troubleshoot faster
Streamlined release note generation process
The Challenge
Cloud Elements is the leading API integration platform for SaaS app providers and digital enterprises. As engineers, they are always looking for a way to automate and improve their processes as much as possible.
Cloud Elements engineers often work remotely or in remote offices, so they needed a quick and efficient way to communicate between them. They wanted to avoid long back-and-forth conversations on Slack and long manual work during releases.
“Leveraging Zight in our Github pull requests and during conversations with our Engineering team saves us about 50 minutes every day!” – Josh Wyse, Sr. Software Developer
The Zight Solution
To avoid long back-and-forth conversations:
By quickly capturing a behavior on their screen with Zight, the engineering team has been able to report bugs and troubleshoot faster. They share hundreds of screenshots and screen recordings daily.
To improve their pull request template to demonstrate changes:
They’ve always required that an engineer create a Github pull request and have that reviewed before it can be merged. Oftentimes, engineers weren’t taking the time to create a thorough, well-written pull request that explained their changes and gave some context to whoever was reviewing. They implemented a new pull request template that now has a ‘Highlights’ section. They strongly recommend the use of videos or GIFs to explain the changes they are committing. After each sprint, a tool pulls out all the ‘Highlights’ from the last release to generate the release notes web page and email programmatically.
The Results
During their release to production each weekend, they run a script that pulls all pull requests between this release and the previous release and generates external release notes. In the past, this was done by their director of engineering, and he would manually go through all of this to determine what changes were introduced. This would take hours and oftentimes lead to less-than-thorough release notes. The ‘Highlights’ section on the pull request template makes it much easier to determine changes and promote them.
Also, the Zight links in these pull requests are used every other Friday in sprint demos, where the engineering team shares new features with other parts of the business so they know what’s going on and can sell, market, etc. based on these changes.
