DeviQA Case Study: Catalyst
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Catalyst

Web Apps, Mobile Apps, Dedicated QA Team

Project Overview

What Catalyst had in the testing processes when they came to us and what they got after they started working with us.

Before improvement

Lack of QA resources
No ability to execute regression testing before each release
Clearly defined tasks at the beginning of the project for QA team

After improvement

Created detailed specifications with clear acceptance criteria
The first release was completed three months after we started working on the project
Created and fully stabilized the testing process
Created and maintained flexible check lists
Execution of smoke tests based on the checklist helped the team to find and fix critical bugs on the feature development stage
Full support of all popular browsers and mobile devices
All versions were released at the appointed time
Prevented huge number of blockers and crashes caused by the big amount of merging
Assisted in the organization of the release process in the App Store/Google Play
Integrated short team meetings to be sure all team is on the same page
25%
Critical Bugs Reported
45%
Major Defects Reported
150
Confluence Pages Created
60
Stories Created
QA Team:
2 Manual QA engineers
Project length:
1 year
Technologies & Tools
Linux
Jenkins
BrowserStack
Android Studio
AWS Device Farm
JIRA
TestRail
Confluence
iOS
Android

The Challenge

Catalyst is the application for BABC therapists designed to collect, sort, and proceed all data in one place with the ability to create different reports, view graphs, and print documents.

The Challenge was to help a company to deliver the initial version of the quality and stable product within three months and to make four future releases with additional features during the next eight months(if the initial release is successful).

Because of the size of the project, which is pretty big and includes Web portal and iOS/Android apps, as well as the lack of QA resources, there was no ability to execute full regression testing before each release. So one of the major requirements was to improve test suites to reduce the time spent on regression testing.

Achievements

Our QA engineers have got familiarized with the project in a short time and started working on QA process improvement to be sure that we will be able to deliver a quality product on time.

Together with the project manager, our QA specialists created detailed specifications with clear acceptance criteria to speed up the development process and to exclude possible errors before they appear.

By adding short 15-minutes daily meetings, we eliminate possible disagreements and misunderstandings in the team, which allowed us to control the timing of tasks.

Thanks to clearly defined tasks and the correct execution of functions, we did not need to write test cases, which allowed us to save time. QA team compiled a flexible checklist, which we update every time the new features added.

A team of QA engineers was able to meet deadlines, and the first version of the product was ready a week before the scheduled release. This allowed the DeviQA to spend a couple of days on demo preparation as well as to help the project manager to organize all activities related to applications release in Google Play & App Store.

Because the investor's and beta user's feedback was positive, we were hired for the next four releases. During the upcoming releases, we created and fully stabilized the process. The execution of smoke tests based on the checklist on every new Web portal and apps build helped the team to find and fix critical bugs on the feature development stage, saving time and money.

Our experience and project functionality knowledge gives up an opportunity to troubleshoot almost any issue and even to predict some of them.

Thanks to a large number of real devices that DeviQA owns, we were able to test the product on all supported versions of iOS/Android, including beta versions, to ensure that the product has expected quality on every popular tablet and phone. Testing the portal on all required browsers and resolutions allowed us to eliminate bugs on the Web part.

Throughout the entire time, all versions were released at the appointed time.

Services Provided

Most of the tests performed during the integration of new features and functionality to production. Smoke tests were run for every new build to prevent blocker bugs or server errors. Backward compatibility tests and synchronization tests were executed to ensure that the user will face only high-quality products. Also, we have been updating smoke tests in fast-paced software.

Web Apps

We tested critical areas on mobile devices, syncing data from-to Web portal, performed smoke tests on iOS/Android applications using various mobile & tablet devices. We prevented a vast number of blockers and crashes caused by the big amount of merging.

Mobile Apps

Two senior manual test engineers from DeviQA worked as a dedicated team and performed manual functional and non-functional testing using Device Farm, Amazon AWS, VMWare, Browserstack, Android studio, as well as real physical devices from DeviQA's test lab, and updated the test documentation. All bugs were tracked and reported in Jira.

Dedicated QA Team