Portfolio
a1qa helps a US-based pest control company ensure high software quality
a1qa was chosen to help the client ensure failsafe operation of multiple IT products and enhance Scrum-based QA processes.
Overview
The client is a well-known pest control organization in North America. Striving to ensure high software quality and accelerate time to market, the client reached out to a1qa.
The tested software falls into 2 groups:
- Solutions tailored to end users who request company services
- IT products for managing internal client processes, such as supervising sales processes, communicating with end users, building routes for effective logistics, and delivering company services.
Services offered
Functional testing
Test automation
Cybersecurity testing
Performance testing
Project scope
When a1qa’s QA engineers and managers joined the project, the client already had an outsourced QA vendor responsible for delivering software testing services. However, the processes were inefficient, and defects still crept into the production environment.
Therefore, a1qa quickly integrated into the client’s existing Scrum-based project environment and initiated the following workflow improvements:
- Assisted in setting up daily Scrum meetings to review project goals, track progress, discuss potential bottlenecks or blockers, and obtain a birds’-eye view of what everyone is working on.
- Helped with establishing processes in Agile boards in Jira to structure the process of working with tasks, trace statuses, and fulfill tasks effectively.
- Created “Improvement lists” that included diverse suggestions for enhancing processes that were discussed and approved by the client’s product owner.
- Wrote the entire project test documentation. First, a1qa prepared a detailed description of 2,000+ checks in TestRail to make further testing possible. Second, the QA engineers created artifacts in Confluence describing all software functionalities. These documents were used by developers.
- Helped with onboarding new developers. a1qa’s QA manager and engineers ran a software demo showcasing the UI, business logic, current integrations, and probable challenges.
- Ensured a1qa engineers were on call to quickly solve any urgent questions.
- Established high workflow transparency due to regular reporting and conducting quarterly presentations on the progress made by the a1qa’s team.
a1qa’s input contributed to becoming the sole vendor for the entire QA scope.
In addition, a1qa’s team conducted a range of software testing activities. Having started with testing 3 applications, the specialists showcased deep QA expertise, diligence, and proactivity, which made the client entrust a1qa with assuring the quality of all web and mobile solutions, including back-end, which throughout the project totalled 19.
The scope of QA support included:
Performance testing
To ensure smooth software operation under a high number of concurrent users and improve the loading speed, a1qa prepared test scenarios, approved them with the client, and fulfilled server-side stress, load, and stability tests.
In addition, the experts set up performance monitoring in Grafana and CloudWatch to measure software output in real time, collect performance metrics, and diagnose performance issues.
In a comprehensive report, the QA engineers described all detected problems and the solutions for mitigating them.
Cybersecurity testing
To spot vulnerabilities in mobile software and protect it from cyberattacks, a1qa performed penetration testing in line with OWASP requirements. The engineers focused on data storage and privacy, cryptography, network communication, platform interaction, code quality, and build settings. Mobile software’s security level was estimated as above medium.
The QA team also verified the security of APIs, assessing authentication, authorization, identity and session management, business logic, error handling, and other aspects. APIs security level was defined as low.
After testing, a1qa’s engineers comprised a detailed report with all spotted vulnerabilities and recommendations for improvement.
Test automation
To cope with extensive regression testing scope and find software issues at the early SDLC stages, a1qa set up automated workflows within testing web and mobile solutions.
The engineers defined the scope for automation, established the Appium framework for mobile testing and Selenium – for web testing, set up a CI system for continuous test runs, wrote Java-based scripts, analyzed results, and delivered reports.
These combined efforts helped automate 20% of app regression tests that were verified with test automation, free up the time of manual QA engineers, and find bugs in the early SDLC stages.
Functional testing
To verify every software feature and confirm that IT products operate in line with specifications, a1qa engineers performed:
- New feature testing helping verify the work of newly added software parts.
- Smoke testing determining if a new software build was ready for further QA activities.
- Regression testing serving to check that novel features didn’t negatively influence the correct operation of other software features.
- Exploratory testing helping go beyond the predefined test suite and cover diverse user scenarios. These tests were mainly performed after all other QA verifications.
- Compatibility testing running against web applications and on a1qa’s mobile devices. At the end of each season, a1qa analyzed statistics on the devices most used by the client’s end users, created the list of verifications based on this information, and ran tests every 3-4 months.
- API testing ensuring smooth interaction between front and back end, as well as high quality of migration to novel endpoints.
- Defect validation confirming that all defects were fixed by the developers promptly.
During testing, the a1qa team also successfully navigated challenges related to integration issues. Because of complex business logic and extensive and diverse features, it was difficult to understand the way applications interact with each other. Therefore, a1qa thoroughly analyzed the client’s software and created an in-depth scheme describing all interconnections and possible effects, providing valuable data for the client’s product owner.
In addition, a1qa suggested ideas for improving the client’s processes to help overcome internal problems and enhance software solutions further.
Technologies & tools
- Postman, Swagger
- Android Studio
- 3uTools, Dialpad
- FullStory
- Jira, Confluence
- Charles, Fiddler
- SQL (DBeaver), DataDog
- ConfigCat
Results
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High quality of 19 web and mobile applications in total, as well as back-end, tailored to the needs of pest experts and their end users.
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Issues detected quicker and earlier in the SDLC due to implementing web and mobile test automation.
In numbers
3+
years of project duration
16
QA specialists in total
19
software solutions tested