HKS provides world class commercial, civil and industrial architectural design services. They pride themselves in offering the highest level of service, design, technical expertise and business performance globally. You may even recognize their work - from sports stadiums, to hospitals, to airports and resorts, HKS is one of the top architecture firms in the world.

Jon Crowell has been a senior consultant for the HKS development team for over two years. In that time, Jon has helped modernize the development process for HKS’ internal line of business applications, and has established Raygun as a standard for crash reporting and customer experience monitoring in all applications.

A world-class company needs world-class software

Jon Crowell - Senior Consultant

Increasing team prestige in the company

During his time at HKS, Jon has been working hard to build a more agile approach toward handling errors. He was finding that due to the globally distributed team and a lack of process, communication around software errors was hit-and-miss.

A world class firm needs to build world class software - and buggy apps weren’t a part of the plan. Without Raygun, errors were either not being reported, or were reported without the supporting detail and context needed to accurately fix the issues.

Something had to change. Since using Raygun, Jon can effectively manage errors and in doing so has increased the company’s faith in their development team:

“Having Raygun in place and being proactively on top of every error that happens - plus being able to respond to them (end users) without them even having to report the error does a whole lot more than make the software experience better. It has increased our prestige in our organization.”

Maintaining development velocity

Jon was finding that the errors in his applications were getting swallowed up by poor infrastructure. Errors were collected into logs that were infrequently reviewed, which is a common issue in busy development teams. However, this meant there was little visibility into issues affecting end users. Raygun helped HKS provide a system around error reporting.

I don’t know what we were missing before we added Raygun. But, now we have it in place, we have a really good feel for when users are experiencing errors

Resolving errors without the need for users to send report

In the busy day-to-day of HKS, Jon was finding that few end users bothered to report errors.

He says: “No-one wants to take the time to talk through what happened or try and reproduce their steps.” He added: “Our users also believe that IT people can’t communicate the problems very well into non-technical language.” This adds another barrier to errors getting reported.

Now, thanks to Raygun’s key features like Customers, the development team can resolve issues for end users without them ever having to submit a ticket. “It’s great to delight someone in that way - when they get a notification that an error they didn’t even report got resolved.”

Raygun has become an indispensable tool

The HKS development team uses Raygun to address issues as they arise. Using the Raygun dashboard, issues can be triaged on a case by case basis. “We know why they come up - we didn’t always know that before.”

After trialing a few tools, Jon knew that Raygun was the one for his team. Raygun is proud to help the HKS development team reach their professional goals, ultimately aiding HKS in their mission of making an impact with their design and consistently delivering the extraordinary.

“Raygun is now standard in all our applications. It’s become a tool that’s indispensable at this point.”