MinuteDock Use Inbox-Zero Approach To Software Errors With Raygun

MinuteDock is online time tracking software designed to be super easy and efficient for freelancers and small businesses. MinuteDock is designed with simplicity in mind – they offer a great product to small businesses primarily in the 1-10 employee space, where most emphasis is on a great user experience and enjoying using the product rather than complex business processes that larger businesses often need to encode. This keeps MinuteDock simple, efficient, and fun to use – which is ideal for small teams.

MinuteDock have been happy customers using Raygun to keep on top of their errors for over a year. This keeps them stress-free (knowing they’re alerted if anything happens), and most importantly their customers happy and humming along about their day. Here we talk to MinuteDock’s CEO Jared Armstrong.

It would have been an unreasonable cost for us to implement what we needed ourselves, so Raygun was a huge cost-saver for us. And because we could just plug it in and go within minutes, it didn’t take long for us to really improve the reliability of the product and keep our customers happy.

Error grouping and ability to mark errors as resolved allows us to keep an “inbox zero” like approach to our errors is the best feature so far. I’m a big fan of inbox zero for email, and following that same philosophy for software errors just makes sense – things don’t get forgotten, and the most important errors are usually the most recent at the top of the list. The Raygun dashboard is perfect for this.

Raygun is like an email inbox for your errors in your software. It notifies you when errors occur, with all the details and meta-data associated with the error. Basically, all the information you need to deal with it and sort out the issue for the customer(s).

One of the great benefits has been the general approach to dealing with errors. We now actually get through dealing with errors to solve them permanently. The grouping system avoids “error overload”, by combining all errors into their relevant context so we can deal with them together. If an error re-occurs, Raygun lets us know and we have all the information there to sort it out.

For example, there was one error that used to happen as a result of flakey 3rd party APIs, but it interrupted the user’s experience and we had to re-initiate the process to solve it for them. It only happened once every few days or so, but with Raygun we could see that over time there were enough instances of that error that we wanted to eradicate it. So, we built a workflow into the application that allowed the user to re-initiate the process from their end rather than relying on us. As a result, we don’t see that error at all anymore, and the customer is getting a much better user experience.

Raygun is a great product and always improving. It’s a pleasure to use, and has really helped us out with our error management process. It’s super easy to integrate, and supports pretty much any development environment you’d want to use.

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