Durkan Group doubles down on project efficiency with Teamwork + Marker.io integration
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Durkan Group is a Digital Creative Agency in Pennsylvania, specializing in designing, building, and marketing custom websites. As a small team of experts, they pride themselves on providing clients with beautifully polished, purpose-built websites.
Sean Hennessy, the Digital Strategist for Durkan Group, has been using both Teamwork and Marker.io as the primary tools to help him and his team capture and log visual bugs and edits for their client websites.
Finding and logging issues, communicating with the QA testers, developers, and clients, and adding issues to a task list to clean up the final details has been an incredibly tedious process for them. Now, the Teamwork and Marker.io integration give each person on the project the tools they need to seamlessly report visual bugs and feedback and build an easy-to-manage list of bug fixes and change requests.
Here’s how they use the Teamwork and Marker.io integration to catch more bugs in less time, reducing the pressure of looming deadlines and leading to overall better website launches.
QA complications
Like most digital agencies, Durkan Group is regularly up against strict deadlines to deliver websites on time for their clients. As project due dates get closer, it’s common for unforeseen design and development tasks to eat into allocated QA time — meaning testers have less time to find and log issues before delivering the final product to the client.
"Time has always been a challenge for us. The date we planned to start QA and the date we actually started QA were sometimes two very different time periods. We always felt like we were cutting it too close to the target launch date, especially when we are testing around 60 devices per project plus reviewing the variations between browsers, operating systems, and device families themselves."
Previously, the Durkan Group was using a complex system of screenshots, notes, links, and too many open browser tabs. It was workable, but it took incredible focus to keep all of those details straight. Even then, errors invariably cropped up when links were posted to the wrong task or when QA testers had to search multiple tabs for the material they needed.
“This multi-step review process was really clunky. It had too many opportunities for potential mistakes, and all of the manual inputs cost us valuable time,” said Sean. “Managers, testers, and developers all wanted a better answer.”
This workflow wasn’t intuitive for clients, either. Durkan Group team members were spending lots of time guiding them through the best ways to share screenshots and make change requests so team members could create a task and find the materials they needed.
One-stop reporting
The Teamwork and Marker.io integration was the missing piece to their workflow.
Once it launched, Sean and his team were up and running in minutes — and were able to use it to help them deliver a truly flawless website experience for their clients.
The seamless integration allowed his team and clients to report visual bugs in Teamwork with additional notes and context without needing to switch away from the websites they were rebuilding.
"It’s so important to our workflows now, that we use the integration every day,” said Sean. “We’re visual people and so are our clients, so now we can make everything happen on one screen."
The integration has also helped them to cut out loads of repetitive work. Bug reports go directly to dedicated projects and task lists in Teamwork, so team members have clear and concise tasks as soon as they’re reported. Logging bugs can also be done in batches, which has ramped up the speed and depth of QA.
Client communication is also simplified. There’s no more back and forth over email looking for detailed feedback or technical information; now, clients can use the integration to log visual bugs in the same way as the QA team, so they can maintain consistency throughout the QA process and cut out lengthy email threads.
Important information like browser, screen size, OS, and zoom level is automatically included in each task so clients don’t need to search for this information themselves — saving clients time while still giving the QA team everything they need.
“Having intuitive tools gives us more engagement and quicker turnarounds, which makes clients feel like they’re included in the process in a big way,” said Sean. “They feel empowered, and that makes a difference throughout the course of the project — not just QA.”
Catching more bugs in less time
Even the best tools don’t eliminate deadline pressures, but now Durkan Group can face them with more confidence.
And the results speak for themselves. Performance analysis showed that the integration has allowed them to identify issues on more devices and do it more comprehensively than before.
"Now we can get more done in QA instead of spending time identifying issues we don’t have time to fix because we caught it too late. The data we’re seeing shows that we’re catching bugs sooner, we’re catching more overall, and that all of that is leading to better product launches."
Durkan Group Founder Niall Durkan says that the integration allows them to be even more confident that websites will work on any device, browser, or OS out there.
"Clients can rest assured that we have an excellent process in place that allows us to deliver an awesome experience. We can be confident that when their site is done and ready to go live, it’s going to work flawlessly. That’s our job."
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