80 people filed 350 tickets in launch week. Their agent team resolved every one in 3 days.
Appalachian Field Service moved off Quickbase fast, on purpose. The plan was to open the new app to all 80 people, let them find what was wrong or missing while doing their real work, and have the company’s agent team fix it as the tickets came in.
- 80 peopleusing the new app from day one
- 350 ticketsfiled in launch week
- 160resolved in the first 7 hours
- All 350resolved by the end of day 3
The plan: move fast, and make everyone a tester
Appalachian had run on Quickbase for almost ten years. They moved everything to software they own in about a month and a half, and cut their software bill from about $55,000 a year to about $18,000 (read part one).
A move that fast was always going to leave bugs and gaps. We knew that going in, and we planned for it. Normally a few developers would hunt for problems one screen at a time. Instead, on launch day, all 80 people got one extra job: use the new app for your real work, and report anything that’s wrong or missing.
They did. Some reports were bugs. Most were the small things only the people doing the work would notice: a report that didn’t say quite the right thing, a summary field missing a detail, a table that needed one more field, a screen where they wanted to upload a document.
You set the rules
The agents made every change on a separate copy of the code (a branch), tested it there, and only then shipped it to the live app. For launch week, Appalachian chose to let tested fixes go straight in, without waiting for a person to sign off. That is the company’s call. It can just as easily have the agents ask first.
How the agents handled it
Every ticket went straight to the company’s agent team: AI workers that live on the company’s own server, next to the app, and can change it. Those agents work where the software lives: the code, the data, the old Quickbase setup and the notes from the move are all in the same place. So they rarely needed anyone to explain what a request meant. Someone submitted a ticket, and the agents had it done for them.
The result
350 tickets came in, and all 350 were resolved: the bug fixed, or the change built and live in the app. 160 of them were done in the first 7 hours.
[We were able to make the switch] while preserving mission-critical data and keeping employees able to do their jobs throughout the transition.
Find out what leaving Quickbase would take.
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- a quote, once we have mapped the app.
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