How HSLDA dramatically improved processes & time spent dealing with bugs by automating bug reports

The company: advocating for homeschooling freedom

30 years ago, homeschooling was illegal in all of the 50 states in the US. Today, it’s legal in all of them. HSLDA is a US-based international legal defense association defending homeschool families, their rights, and their freedom to choose to homeschool. HSLDA works with different state organizations to make sure there are good solid walls in place to protect homeschoolers and education rights in general.

The challenge: frustrating, manual, and non-standardized processes

Rachel Bell joined HSLDA as a Salesforce developer, where she wears different hats: helping service administrators and project managers in various projects, talking with end-users to ensure that everything is operating as it should, and developing new projects and solutions, both internally and for their customers.
Working in different development environments means dealing with a ton of data, including bugs. HSLDA was missing a tool that would easily capture all the information from their development, product, and client-facing environments to help Rachel’s team debug faster.

This process for reporting and finding bugs was time-consuming, made worse when their customers, who at times are less tech-savvy, get frustrated not knowing how to provide useful information to Rachel’s team. The painful process would involve:

• Internal team or end-user experiences bug
• A ticket gets created containing non-standardized information, which mostly lived in either a Word doc or in various methods of recording, which added to the confusion
• Developers or QA go back and forth with the bug reporter to collect missing information (“Which browser are you using? What is your OS?”)
• Once data is collected, there is no centralized place nor an organized way to house this information
• Bugs end up taking much, much longer to solve than they should

“Different tensions and issues arise when all you needed was just information to be able to solve a bug. We experience those internally within the tech team and also in other departments that deal with users reporting issues,” recalls Rachel.

The requirements: what did HSLDA need?

Like many other companies, HSLDA turned to remote working when the pandemic hit, which came with its own communication challenges, including communicating bugs. As the team  switched to a hybrid setup and HSLDA continued to scale, Rachel’s team knew their existing process was not robust and would not scale with the business. The team needed an all-in-one bug reporting tool that would streamline the bug reporting process, ease the tension and frustration within the team, and free up everyone’s time for more high-value work.

The solution: intuitive, all-in-one bug reporting tool

HSLDA chose Bird because they needed a tool that can capture and organize a wide range of data and one that enables easy sharing within the team. Rachel shared that Bird was particularly helpful during the time when her team was upgrading to a new CMS and had issues with Single Sign-On (SSO). Being able to capture a Bird recording on both production and staging environments and being able to compare and view all the different requests has immensely helped her team to immediately identify differences instead of pulling out two separate browsers and not being able to easily share it within the team.

The success: automated, easily shareable bug reports for both its team and users

HSLDA decided to use Bird in early 2020 in order to create a system of record for bug reports received from both within the team and their end-users and to offer a self-serve approach to their end-users to easily report bugs without all the frustrating back and forth. After close to zero setup was required, HSLDA quickly began to see value.

• An intuitive, easy-to-use platform: “With a quick install of the Bird extension and sharing sessions with links, there’s almost no knowledge or experience needed both internally and with our end-users to report bugs. Bird’s really intuitive and has been super helpful.”
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• Dramatic time savings: “We’ve gone from spending too much time (and frustration) on trying to collect meaningful data to help us find and debug to auto-collecting info with just a few clicks. I can easily view which browser and version of it are being used, errors in consoles, and other data that’s usually missing from bug reports which eliminate hours of work that was previously necessary for bug reporting. Bird has removed a chunk of manual work and created a really solid flow.”
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• Ever-improving software: “One of the most impressive features of Bird is how the Bird Eats Bug team is constantly improving the software. HSLDA was an early adopter of Bird which has allowed us to see how quickly the Bird Eats Bug team is launching new features. What started as a recording tool has turned into a centralized DevOps tool that allows developers to collaborate with comments on the session itself. This makes it easy for any team to review, find, and fix the issue effectively and efficiently.”

The single biggest reason to recommend Bird