koality.io Roadmap – What we have in mind for 2021

2020 was a super important year for us. We founded koality.io and launched version 1, which we are already very happy with. But since we think stagnation is as stupid as you do, we want to write you our plans for the next versions.

The goal is to convince some of you that koality.io is the tool you should rely on in the future. On the other hand we want to incorporate your ideas. We believe that we have a good gut feeling with our many years of experience, but feedback from you is still very important.

This is our current plan. Please help us to sort the features and add more ideas.

Onboarding

It will probably be finished in 2020, since we are already in the process. The goal is to make it even easier to set up new projects. We're already down to a maximum of 10 minutes per project, but we think there's still a lot to do.

The new setup gets a very special wizard. In Leankoala it is called Component Finder and that describes very well what it does. Every project starts with filling in the web pages to be monitored. You add a start page, your sitemap, a search results page, the imprint and so on. The new feature will find these URLs automatically. Now already with a very high hit rate.

Standard-Crawls

Besides the continuous accessibility monitoring and other important features, koality.io also offers a crawler, which it adds for free. But we are still relatively at the beginning. The goal here is to provide all the standard crawls you need for websites. At the beginning there will be the following crawls:

• Dead Links
• Too large images
• Missing link to imprint
• Missing Google Analytics pixelation
• Lorem Ipsum texts
• JavaScript error

Languages

Rather unusual for a SaaS solution, we started in German. Since we proud hamburger and have first targeted the German market, it makes sense. But since we are continuously growing we already have the challenge to have customers with developers who do not speak German. And of course the English speaking markets are also very exciting for us. This means that koality.io will be available in English at least by 2021. The groundwork has already been laid.

Alerting

Our alerting system is already relatively mature and sophisticated. We can store e-mail addresses of all colleagues. Especially useful here is our extension, which reacts to the severity of the errors found. Serious errors are sent immediately by e-mail, light and moderate errors grouped once a day. Or in the way you want it grouped. But we want to get a little more extensive in two places:

• Alert channels: so far we have "only" e-mail as a possible alerting endpoint. Here we will add on Slack, Microsoft Teams and Webhook.

• Alerting according to topic: even if alerting according to severity is already very advantageous, we want to expand it so that, for example, found dead links are immediately sent to the editorial office and technical errors are only reported to the agency. In this way, we want to make it easier to handle the errors and remove intermediate steps.

User administration

The most frequently requested feature so far is a user administration. Multiple roles, multiple users. Since Leankoala already has the whole thing, we can describe here what it will look like:

• Roles: we will have administrators who can do all in the project. There will be employees who could adjust the thresholds and restart tests. Finally, there will be the "Watcher" who can only see the data, but cannot interact with it. This role can be given to the agency customer, for example.

• Limited visibility: koality.io is known to take care of all important areas of a website and is not a special tool that only covers one area. Since not all areas are always important for all websites, there will be the possibility to hide individual areas. For example, if SEO is not important, you can explicitly turn it off for a project.

Reporting

Many of our customers are agencies that round out their service portfolio with koality.io and offer monitoring to their customers. Coupled with consulting and support, this is a great, welcome service.

To make the thousands of tests that koality.io continuously conducts more transparent, we want to generate a weekly or monthly report. This report should contain all important statistics and problems that have occurred. Of course, the whole report should be in the corporate design of the agency.

Own domain

We love agencies as customers. For this reason we want to give them the opportunity to use our system in their own corporate identity. Own colors, own logo and perhaps most important: own domain. This allows the agency to offer the system to the client, so that it looks like a unified whole with the other services that are offered.

Registration

When it comes to monitoring entire websites and projects, it is important to give the user a way to specify URLs that are not so easily accessible. This can happen if the site is password protected, the whole system is behind a firewall or you just need to log in. There will be three solutions for this, which we will gradually adapt from Leankoala for koality.io.

• HTTP Basic Auth: Ok, this will probably be available before 2021. Username and password for project pages. Mostly used for staging environments.
• Fixed IP: some systems are behind a firewall. This means that you can't actually reach them from the outside. koality.io will offer best IP addresses that can be unlocked inside the firewall and thus limit access from the outside to a minimum.
• Login: probably the most challenging protection against unauthorized access is login, i.e. registration via a web form. We know that it is a big challenge because we have already implemented it for Leankoala. So for us "nothing more" than an adaptation.

Accessibility

In terms of content, of course, we want to expand our portfolio and not just make what we already do even better. That's why we will also address the issue of accessibility in 2021. Alongside accessibility, performance, search engine friendliness, content, technology and security, accessibility will form the seventh pillar. Since new laws will also apply from 2021, we are particularly looking forward to this topic.

Click-throughs

We would say that click-throughs are the supreme discipline in website monitoring. That's why we want to have them in our program by 2021. In the first step we want to concentrate on the easy routes. But we believe that these are the ones that can generate an incredible added value. So you will be able to implement at least the following scenarios:

• Add product to shopping cart and check if it arrives
• Buy product
• Fill out contact form

Anyone who has a little experience with click-throughs knows that these processes already cover most of them. Always in different variations, but by and large that's it. A special highlight will also be the prefabricated routes. It doesn't make sense, for example, if every user has to test the Magento shopping cart over and over again, when the same test comes out again and again. Here we want to offer ready-made templates. We will start with the current Shopsystemen.

Recommendations for action

Standard problems usually have standard solutions. This is a wonderful thing, because 80% of all problems that occur belong to these standards. Especially the mistakes in the editorial environment occur again and again. Especially dead links, large images or missing content. koality.io will offer a solution for such anomalies. "What do I have to do in my Wordpress to make the images smaller?" would be a classic question, which we want to offer proactively with every error.

Magazine

We also want to continue in 2021 in terms of content. Our goal is to publish two articles every week on the topic of monitoring and web development. So as before as well. But what will be new will be a video column. Under the name "Unboxing Technology" we will look at software and services, install them and discuss the basics. We started with the tools we use ourselves, but we also want to give other tools the chance to be discussed at our place.

These were already our fixed points for 2021 and if you, our users or potential users, have any further ideas, then twitter will be happy to share them with us. We always have an open ear for innovations.