Case Study

10x the QA team. Zero production outages.

How Checksum helps Counterpart ships to production every day, without outages

1

significant production issue caught per week

0

production outages

10x

QA team impact at half the cost of one offshore developer

About

Counterpart

Counterpart is the first Agentic Insurance™ system that combines underwriting, broker support, risk mitigation, and claims expertise with advanced AI.

the problem

Staying Ahead of Growing Complexity

Counterpart is the first Agentic Insurance™ system that combines underwriting, broker support, risk mitigation, and claims expertise with advanced AI. Counterpart’s engineering team ships to production daily using a lean, developer-driven model with no dedicated QA headcount. Unit tests and manual end-to-end verification kept pace with the product through its early stages. As the system grew more complex — with more services, more cross-team dependencies, and more configurations maintained by non-engineering teams — the team knew the manual approach would not scale.

"We knew that as our systems grew more complex, manual verification alone wasn't going to cut it," said Ron Alexssen, Engineering Manager at Counterpart. "We wanted to get ahead of it before it became a real problem."

Rather than waiting for gaps to surface in production, Counterpart sought automated end-to-end test coverage that could scale with the product.

the Solution

Why Counterpart Chose Checksum

After evaluating several tools, Counterpart selected Checksum. A few things stood out.

Test ownership

With most competitors, the test suite lives in the vendor's system. If a company walks away from the contract, the tests go with it. With Checksum, the tests live in Counterpart's own codebase. "If we decided to end our relationship with you guys tomorrow, we still have the tests, and we can run them," Alexssen explained. "That's super appealing."

Model simplicity

Checksum's workflow-based pricing and the offer of a proof-of-concept pilot made the decision low-risk. Within the first fifteen days of a thirty-day pilot, Counterpart had already met all of its original test targets.

Partnership quality

Counterpart gained direct access to Checksum's engineering team and found the account team to be responsive and genuinely helpful. "It goes well beyond just, okay, we'll build some workflows for you and then fade away in the night."

the Results

Engineering Ships with Confidence

For Alexssen, the value proposition comes down to a straightforward comparison.

"For less than half the salary cost of an offshore developer, I have a full QA team. Or at least I have the impact of a full QA team," he said. "If I were trying to replace what Checksum is doing, it would take me at least a full team of six to ten people to build this framework, get it running, and constantly be writing tests."

Checksum fills that function at a fraction of the cost, freeing engineering to focus on building products. That extra assurance changes the conversation. Engineering now shows up to company-wide meetings and reports zero production outages for the code they own. "When I don't have to report any outages, I feel like a hero," Alexssen said. "Zero is my favorite number."

Broad coverage across teams.

In the first week after fully implementing blocking on the test suite, Checksum caught three issues ahead of a scheduled release. Two were code-related. One was a configuration change made outside of engineering. For Alexssen, that was the proof point. "That totally shows the value goes well beyond just the engineering team," he said.

Consistent release quality.

Since Counterpart began using Checksum's results to gate releases, the team estimates they've prevented at least one significant production issue per week.

Faster root cause identification.

When tests flag an issue, Checksum's replay capability lets engineers and managers watch exactly what happened in the browser and trace it to the source. "Being able to look at the functional problem and say, 'This is the problem. Hey Dev, go find it in the code' is pretty cool," Alexssen said.

Self-healing tests reduce maintenance overhead.

When code changes alter the underlying functionality, Checksum's self-healing feature automatically updates affected tests. "Sometimes it happens when we don't even recognize that we changed something that was gonna break a test, and it just gets fixed. And we're like, oh, cool. The test suite still works."

Checksum gives me the impact of a full QA team for less than half the monthly salary of an offshore developer. Why would I not spend that money?

Ron Alexssen

Engineering Manager