Overview
Sauce Labs provides cloud-based infrastructure for automated web and mobile testing, primarily used by medium to large engineering organizations. Sauce Labs earns nearly $100 millions in annual recurring revenue.
During my time at Sauce Labs I supported enterprise customers with various issues, assessing potential bugs on the platform, or guiding customers to fix their problems.
The Problem
Sauce Labs being a global provider, I had to support many different customers with different tech stacks. While some issues were specific to the Sauce Labs platform, diagnosing them required closely reproducing the customer's test environment and behavior.
Reproducing test steps
An area where support engineers were spending a lot of time was trying to reproduce the exact steps a customer was taking before encountering their problem.
Dealing with multiple tech stacks
Supporting multiple customers meant the problem could exist between the platform and the tools they were using. While the majority were using Java, a significant part also used C# or JavaScript. Being able to validate hypothesis with these stacks was thus crucial.
My approach
Cloning tests executed by customers
To reproduce the steps taken by customers, I wrote a script. The script took the logs of a failing test, parsed them to identify which selenium or appium commands were used, and generated the corresponding code. This was essentially cloning a test execution in code form, that could be executed again and again for bug reproduction.
Project templates
Since the support team had to deal with multiple stacks. I created project template ready to be used in multiple languages. This sped up the validation of simple hypothesis.
Results & Outcomes
Faster response time
In our ticketing system, we could track how fast each support engineer was fixing customer issues. Thanks to my technical skills and the code I wrote to help the team, I was able to reduce the overall response time.
98% customer satisfaction
The most important metric of the team was customer satisfaction. I was ranking in the top 3 of the team, which helped the overall metric to stay consistently at 98%.