Tend × Checksum - Customer Story

Tend keeps its peak season stable with Checksum’s end-to-end test suite

Tend, Spiraledge’s farming management platform, has a very non-SaaS-typical usage curve.

“Our peak season for Tend is December through March. Farmers aren’t in the fields then, so they’re on the computer doing all of their Tend work. That’s when we peak out—January and February are our strongest months.” – Tomer Petel, CEO, Tend

During those months, usage spikes, bug reports accelerate, and the product team ships a rapid stream of hotfixes and improvements. That combination—heavy usage + constant change—is exactly when regressions are most painful.

Tomer’s mandate was simple: before the next peak, get real end-to-end coverage on Tend’s most critical flows and wire it directly into the team’s existing development process.

Checksum became the backbone of that effort.

The challenge: Protect the core workflows before peak season

The Tend team was releasing “all the time like crazy,” especially heading into Q4. At the same time, they knew that the coming December–March window would stress every part of the product:

• More farmers active in the app

• More variability in how workflows are used

• More hotfixes pushed under time pressure

The riskiest point wasn’t the long tail of obscure features. It was the core workflows—especially the onboarding and initial setup flows that every new customer touches.

If those break during peak months, support volume spikes and trust erodes fast.

Tend needed:

• Comprehensive E2E coverage on the most business-critical flows

• A way to feed failures into JIRA automatically with enough context to act

• A feedback loop so real user issues become permanent test coverage

• Something the team could run locally as tests-as-code, not a black box

And they needed it in place before January–February so they could, in Tomer’s words, “look back and ask, ‘How has it been? Did we discover a lot of problems? Did we prevent a lot of problems?’”

The solution: A full E2E suite wired into Tend’s delivery pipeline

1. Targeting the most critical flows first

Checksum started by building a comprehensive end-to-end test suite around the workflows that matter most to Tend’s business:

• New customer onboarding

• Core flows documented in Tend’s internal training and feature videos

• The most frequently accessed areas that drive day-to-day usage

Instead of guessing, Checksum used Tend’s own internal video documentation to reverse-engineer the “happy paths” and real-world sequences users follow. Those flows became the backbone of the initial test suite.

The outcome: from day one, automation was protecting the exact journeys Tend cares most about during peak season.

2. JIRA-native bug reporting, every single day

To keep this operationally lightweight for Tend’s team, Checksum fully integrated its pipeline with Tend’s JIRA environment.

Every day, Checksum runs the full E2E suite. When a test fails, Checksum:

• Automatically opens a JIRA ticket

• Includes full reproduction steps

• Attaches artifacts (screenshots, logs, failure traces)

• Links back to the specific test and scenario

  For Tend, this means:

• No separate QA system to manage

• Engineers stay in their existing sprint and JIRA workflows

• Triage becomes much faster because every issue arrives “pre-debugged”

Bugs aren’t just detected—they’re delivered in a format the team can act on immediately.

3. A feedback loop from the field back into coverage

Peak season means more end-user feedback. Tend already had a process for collecting and resolving those issues through its internal systems; Checksum plugged directly into that loop.

Here’s how it works now:

1. End users report issues through Tend’s feedback system.

2. Tend’s internal team investigates and resolves them.

3. Any issue flagged as high-priority or high-risk is sent back to Checksum.

4. Checksum builds or updates tests around that scenario.

Those scenarios are then locked into the E2E suite, so the same class of issue doesn’t sneak back in during the next release cycle.

Over time, that creates a ratchet effect: every painful bug becomes a new guardrail, and the test suite gets more representative of real-world risk instead of hypothetical edge cases.

4. Tests-as-code: Local runs and deeper collaboration

Checksum doesn’t just own the automation; it delivers tests-as-code back to Tend.

That gives Tend’s engineering team the ability to:

• Run the full E2E suite locally for on-demand validation

• Use the same test artifacts for investigation and debugging

• Treat Checksum’s work as an extension of their own codebase, not a black box vendor

When something breaks, engineers aren’t waiting on an external platform—they can pull the tests, run them, and iterate quickly.

5. A global testing model that follows the sun

Tend’s development team is based in Vietnam. Checksum’s engineering team is distributed between the US and India.

Instead of that being a coordination tax, the testing setup turns it into an advantage:

• Failures from the prior day’s runs are ready to triage first thing in the morning.

• Real-time channels between Tend and Checksum allow for quick clarification on failures.

• Issues can be identified, reproduced, and handed off across time zones with minimal friction.

• The result is a global QA loop that keeps velocity high while still building the safety net Tomer wants ahead of peak season.

Early impact and what’s next

From Tomer’s side, the trajectory is clear:

“I think things are progressing and we’re going to be measuring over the next few months… we’ll look in February and say, ‘How has it been? Did we discover a lot of problems? Did we prevent a lot of problems?’”

Already, Tend has:

• A living E2E suite covering its most critical customer journeys

• Daily, automated checks feeding cleanly into JIRA

• A closed-loop process where real user issues become permanent tests

• Tests-as-code that engineers can run locally, whenever they need deeper validation

• A global triage model that supports constant releases without losing control

And importantly, there’s trust in the partnership:

“I just want to say good job on the team here, I appreciate your work.” – Tomer Petel, CEO, Tend

As Tend heads into its busiest months, Checksum’s goal is simple: keep the core flows stable so the team can continue releasing “like crazy” without fearing that the next deploy will break the journeys their farmers rely on most.