How NetEase Cloud Commerce Scaled SaaS Quality Assurance for Rapid Growth

Business Characteristics

NetEase Cloud Commerce (https://b.163.com/) is a B2B commercial growth platform offering four major modules: positioning research, marketing MA, SCRM, and customer service. Its business scope covers the entire enterprise digital lifecycle, requiring vertical coverage of user research, marketing, sales, and service, as well as horizontal customization for various industries.

Quality Challenges

The rapid expansion introduces several quality challenges:

Technical debt and non‑standard processes cause quality loss.

Agile and micro‑service delivery multiplies quality assurance effort.

Complex business logic increases test‑data preparation and environment stability costs.

Continuous user growth raises performance and reliability expectations.

Quality System Goals

Establish a quality‑process framework, quantify audit results, and continuously drive business‑level quality improvement.

Methodology

Standardization : Review → Publish → Execute → Optimize.

Visualization : Build a platform → Visualize metrics → Empower quality management.

Automation : Deploy automation → Test automation (high‑ROI UI & API) → Release automation → Quality‑metric automation.

Digital Drive : Set baselines → Quantify assessment → Monthly review → Continuous improvement.

Implementation Practices

R&D Process Standardization : Using the Overmind platform, NetEase’s efficiency team integrated end‑to‑end pipelines (requirements, CI, testing, release) and introduced quality checkpoints for test and release reviews.

Quality Management Visualization : Six core metrics (team, QA, Dev dimensions) were selected and integrated into the Skynet visualization platform, providing real‑time, multi‑dimensional quality data for all business lines.

Quality Assurance Automation : The GoAPI testing platform combined with auxiliary tools enables full‑stack API automation across multi‑tenant environments, while CI pipelines trigger these tests on every release. Core scenarios are monitored every 15 minutes.

Digital Quality Improvement : Each small development squad (front‑end, back‑end, test) conducts bi‑weekly retrospectives, extracts root causes, and implements improvement actions; over 200 improvement tickets have been closed.

Quality Service Platformization : The YSTest platform consolidates SaaS‑specific quality tools, offering unified HTTP APIs for long‑connection testing (e.g., cloud‑call) and simplifying automated data generation.

Reliability Testing : Dedicated teams perform fault injection, end‑to‑end stress testing, and performance regression, all automated within the testing platform.

Future Directions

After the first phase, key metrics show a 60% drop in defect density, SLA of four nines, 50% faster defect resolution, and a 75% reduction in user‑issue handling time. The next focus is on intelligent testing and a testing capability middle‑platform, emphasizing automation, precise testing, and automated follow‑up of improvement measures.

Conclusion

The past year of quality system construction at NetEase Cloud Commerce demonstrates that systematic process, visualization, and automation can dramatically improve SaaS delivery quality, offering a reference for other SaaS product teams.