Success Story: Tailwind App

Tailwind is the social media scheduling tool that gets real results in less time.

Here's Matt Woods, Tailwind's Product Manager, speaking about how Qase has helped them refine their QA processes and make a huge step towards making every release bug-free.

Tailwind initially started as a solution for the founders' own marketing purposes while building BridesView.com. The very first version of Tailwind (then named PinLeague) asked a simple question: is it possible to identify brides-to-be using Pinterest to plan their weddings? As the team dug in deeper, they began to see rapid success on Pinterest. Pretty soon, their friends started asking if Tailwind could generate similar insights for them. A huge opportunity was emerging and it was decided to pivot, focusing on opening the best Pinterest marketing and analytics platform to everyone.

Early on, Tailwind team realized that their approach to quality assurance was suboptimal - a combination of spreadsheets and Slack notifications simply didn't cut it: there was no defined step-by-step process, which oftentimes resulted in missed bugs and new features not tested properly, bugs ended up on Tailwind users' phones, making the Tailwind team restless and not 100% happy with their product. Something had to be done.

That's when Matt and Tyler Hunt, Software Engineer @ Tailwind started researching the market for a solid test management solution, that would help them formalize pre-release testing process and make it scalable and reliable. Qase was soon selected to be the tool that Tailwind team would go with.

Passing the word to Matt:

What was the selling point of Qase for your team?

• Our team was in the process of building and testing our most ambitious mobile app launch to-date. But we couldn’t help but worry that some bugs would slip through the cracks on launch day.
• We wanted to replace our hacked-together system of spreadsheets + Slack with “blocks” of testing that we can re-use over and over again. We wanted to avoid missing test cases or long threads just to figure out “who should test what?”

How did the process of testing change after you picked up Qase, what were the most noticeable shifts?

Before:

• We were constantly hunting down details in Slack to figure out “who did what?”
• Matt didn’t have peace of mind as the Product Manager because there was always a feeling in the back of his mind: “Did we miss something that will come back to bite us on launch day?”
• QA testers would accidentally miss cases or forget to report results.
• Setting up new test cases in Google Sheets was a series of annoying copying-and-pasting chores. And it was easy to forget something important!

After:

• Everything is in one place, not all over the place. The whole process of running a QA round is simplified and managed online with Qase.
• It was easy for every team member to know what still needs to be tested, re-tested, or fixed.
• Matt slept soundly at night confident that everything was fully tested from end-to-end and ready for launch day.
• Testers are notified automatically and test results come through in real-time, which enabled rapid iteration instead of frustrating delays.

Tailwind's measurable results of using Qase:

• 30m → 15m QA runs. At least twice as fast for a few reasons: no more long strings of back-and-forth follow-up in Slack. It’s all covered in one place! Easy to set up and re-run test suites without copy-pasting each time.
• The new app we QA’d with Qase and shipped went from dozens or even hundreds of bug and crash reports per month to 5 or fewer per week.
• We more than doubled upgrades in the new app during our launch month, in part due to the bug-free, stable experience our users have come to know and love.