Klara uses CircleCI to focus on fast delivery with zero quality comprises

In healthcare, details matter, and providing quality features that support patients means that stability is key.

Klara, headquartered in New York and founded in 2013, simplifies how healthcare providers communicate and engage with both their patients and each other, securely. The platform offers providers streamlined administrative workflows, which saves hours per day, all while providing their patients with a delightful and personalized experience.

Healthcare requires fast delivery with zero quality compromises

To rapidly deliver the best product without stability issues requires developer expertise and an intuitive and flexible tool stack. Valentin Ranshakov, QA Lead, and the Klara software team focus on fast delivery with zero compromises on quality. Since Valentin came on board in 2021, he’s been pushing his team to secure valuable feedback on their builds as quickly as possible. Klara’s developers use CircleCI to run more than 1,000 end-to-end (E2E) tests for every commit in their core products.

E2E tests are among the slowest running of all types of tests because they require setting up and tearing down everything in order to simulate the actual user journey. Because of that complexity, they tend to be the flakiest and the most difficult to maintain — especially if your infrastructure isn’t set up to handle them.

Klara has relied on CircleCI to maintain confidence during these finicky tests and to keep tests up-to-date in changing environments. Without CircleCI, Valentin believes the challenge of balancing development, maintaining functionality, and testing code at pace would be insurmountable.

In fact, Klara has relied on CircleCI consistently to manage its continuous integration (CI) since 2014. Its teams have grown alongside CircleCI’s feature set onto more powerful machines as their needs developed, with CircleCI covering all of Klara’s CI requirements. Using CircleCI’s powerful features, Klara’s team has quintupled since 2019.

“Testing, validation, and confidence in our code are key. We need the power of the cloud to deliver at scale. CircleCI connects our processes and pipelines and brings visibility into our coding environment, offering efficiency and rapid, high performance. I came from businesses where waiting for tests meant idle developers. At Klara we run complex tests in 15 minutes or less in concert with CircleCI.”

Valentin Ranshakov
QA Lead at Klara

Understanding and acting to make rapid change

Developers never enjoy the process of finding faults with their code. CircleCI makes the process of finding and remediating faults fast and pain-free so Klara’s developers can concentrate on their value-add and drive the business forward with strong product delivery.

“We can’t deliver our product and support the sales team while waiting for tests to run over hours and days. Understanding the links between development and productivity helps us create realistic objectives, considering only our developer work and not worrying about a problematic deployment,” explains Valentin. He logs onto work every day with confidence, knowing he and his team can maintain their high code delivery with CircleCI.

Klara’s use of CircleCI has also enabled their team to save on an infrastructure management role. The platform has been so easy for Klara’s team to use, they have consistently saved time and budget. Independent research from a Forrester Total Economic Impact Study shows that CircleCI reduces the time for end-to-end software development builds by 50%, saves 50% in infrastructure costs, and increases developer productivity by 10%.

CircleCI brings healthy speed and joy to developers

The development team spins up testing environments within CircleCI, running applications in the pipeline that are not exposed outside the platform. It would not be possible to run the volume of required tests on a local machine. Klara requires a cloud-based pipeline to act and to constantly improve on the process. Its engineers work to Agile development practices in six-week cycles, close to the business roadmap. With CircleCI, they catch bugs before their customers see the software, implement new technologies, and offer demonstrations at each team sprint.

“CircleCI has been a constant, helping Klara deploy to different customer systems while we maintain HIPAA compliance. Even as our business and cloud environments change, we stick with CircleCI, which continues to serve us through growth,” says Valentin.

Its developers make use of the CircleCI Insights dashboard to manage productivity. The 35 engineers can see all their flaky tests, as well as green and red test results, as a core insight. Additionally, they use customizable compute with parallelism and orbs.

“CircleCI has a great community and very well-written documentation, which helps set up pipelines in minutes. Anyone with basic Linux terminal skills can set up themselves without specialists. We recommend their powerful features for running multiple tests, along with parallel tests, so you don’t need to worry about distributing across different environments.”

“If anyone asks about changing the software behind our CI or suggests other tools, I’d tell them it’s off the table!” laughs Valentin. “We know it would cost much more time and money to migrate out of CircleCI or change the current smooth and seamless process.”