The Nerdery
Fostering a Culture of Innovation to Deliver Quality Experience

“The Nerdery brings more than a decade of human and context-centered quality assurance that’s fully integrated into the business, design and development teams to elevate our clients’ technology,” said Chris Locher, VP of Software Development at The Nerdery, a custom software design and development company. “We integrate with our clients by being as passionate about their business as we are about our own–it shows in the quality of our work, all backed by a QA team ahead of its field.”

“We’ve sent our quality assurance process consultants to several companies looking to augment their own QA process,” said Kai Esbensen, The Nerdery’s Director of Quality Assurance. “These companies all had strong preconceptions about QA, how it works, and how to approach it; all these companies ended up trashing their preconceived models in favor of models advised by us.”

“We have a philosophy of ‘the best idea wins,’” said Locher. “By allowing people to foster, explore and apply their passions, we’ve been able to accomplish amazing things in every aspect of our business.”

The Nerdery’s core services are mobile applications, web applications, websites, systems integration and digital consulting. “As a professional services organization, we have to be agile in best practices in software design, development and quality assurance,” says The Nerdery's CEO, Tom O’Neill. “Our QA capabilities constantly evolve to meet the needs of enterprise leaders. We challenge partners to consider quality assurance as important as design and development. With the digital transformation, companies are setting bigger budgets for QA and adopting customer-facing technology and internal-business systems.”

“All of our QA test plans are—and always have been—fully customized and project-specific,” said Esbensen.“We anticipated the growing trend for our increasingly sought-after capabilities in automation-testing and have long since put rigorous training procedures in place to keep our QA engineers up to snuff. In terms of emerging trends, we've seen exciting advances in QA-industry-focus on security testing, accessibility testing, IoT, virtualization/cloud-infrastructure testing, and the emergence of powerful new open-source tools to help it all hum along smoothly.”

Our approach is to provide not only quality technology to clients but a quality experience

“Our QA team rapidly evolves and adapts to stay ahead of ever-evolving security threats,” said Locher. “Our strategy is early adoption, experimentation and iteration. We deliberately position Nerds to try new things and roll lessons learned back into the entire team. CEOs and CIOs can’t just say ‘go innovate!’ Foster a culture where everyone can innovate, and amazing things start happening.”

With offices in Chicago, Kansas City, Minneapolis and Phoenix, The Nerdery is the professional home of about 500 software engineers, UX designers, QA engineers and other Nerds whose purpose is to redefine what’s possible through technology.

“We've worked to become agile and forward thinking in the world of quality assurance,” said O’Neill. “We're exposed to such a variety of enterprises, infrastructures, and innovative leaders through our work. We've harnessed that experience and created a culture of innovation that is infectious.”

“One company we know tracked their cost of fixing post-release defects, and compared that to their cost of pre-release QA testing—they found an ROI of over 200 percent,” said Esbensen. “Their testing costs were recouped in half a year; and they enjoyed an uptick of over 10 percent in their customer base.”

“Our approach is to provide not only quality technology to clients but a quality experience,” said Locher. “We measure success when a client stands up and says, ‘You made my company, my team, and me better.’”