From almost 50 outages to zero

As digital interactions surged during the pandemic, the client’s development capacity scaled quickly to meet demand but quality practices could not. In just 12 months, around 50 production outages occurred, mainly caused by application errors.

Key issues

• Mounting technical debt
• Performance and scalability bottlenecks
• Long recovery times after failures
• Lack of defined quality gates in delivery pipelines
• Minimal visibility into release readiness or production health
  
  

All these factors led to a frustrated workforce, eroded stakeholder confidence, and a business caught in a cycle of firefighting instead of innovating.

Nagarro initiated a Quality Engineering (QE) transformation that focused on ensuring cultural change and technical enablement:

1. Quality vision and roadmap Established fast and sustainable delivery lanes to balance speed with stability.
2. Shift-left mindset Embedded quality earlier in the SDLC through proactive test design, performance validation, and architectural reviews.
3. Scalable automation Revamped the automation framework for better coverage, higher maintainability, and seamless CI/CD integration.
4. Defined quality gates Standardized release criteria across teams to ensure readiness before deployment.
5. Dashboards and observability Rolled out real-time quality dashboards to monitor defect trends, coverage metrics, and production health.
6. Cross-functional alignment Formed the Core, Challenger, and Steering teams to drive execution, remove roadblocks, and ensure strategic oversight.

The transformation delivered measurable improvements:

• Outages reduced consistently and significantly year-on-year, with improved stability in critical releases, from 27 in 2020 to 0 in 2023.
• Release confidence increased, enabling faster go-to-market without sacrificing reliability.
• Automation coverage and efficiency improved, freeing teams to focus on high-value exploratory testing.
• Technical debt management became proactive, preventing issues before they impacted production.
• Cultural shift was achieved as teams reported better collaboration and ownership of quality, shifting the culture from "QA's job" to "everyone's responsibility."