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Assessment of media company’s QA processes consulting services
The a1qa consulting specialists were approached to evaluate the quality of the company's QA processes.
Overview
The customer is the editorial company with millions of unique visitors, social media fans and followers.
The target audience is women of various age groups and social backgrounds. The company publishes mass media and advertising content on a number of its websites. On-trend content is published on a daily basis and is managed via CMS.
The a1qa consulting specialists were approached to evaluate the quality of the company’s QA process, detect its shortcomings, audit the team’s qualification, and estimate the possibility of applying Agile techniques.
Services offered
QA consulting
Agile testing
QA audit
Project scope
The main focus was on the development process and on test automation implementation.
As part of the assessment project, the a1qa specialists carried out 9 interviews and questioned 12 team members, its vendors, and QA-engineers and thoroughly analyzed all QA-artifacts: QA-checklists, recent defects statistics, Sonar results for unit test coverage, test automation and performance scripts.
The a1qa team also reviewed additional, non-QA specific documentation such as an organizational chart, roadmaps, Atlassian Jira projects, and many more.
As the client presented conjunction of different organizations with no uniform QA methodologies or policies, the QA specialists were shared between Agile squads with a few dedicated QA manual testers and test automation engineers, some of which were contractors.
The communication process was obstructed. However, a1qa had to evaluate the quality of the remote teams and a way out was found – some of the distributed teams were interviewed remotely.
Within the project realization, numerous problem spots were detected. The a1qa consultants studied them all and came up with suggestions for improvement.
A detailed report indicating all the results, proposals for improvement and a roadmap for proposals implementation was prepared.
The a1qa specialists defined some of the problem areas and submitted proposals including the following:
Process
- As there was no integration testing in place, the a1qa consultants included it and its long-term automation into the QA strategy.
- Because of the absence of security testing, the QA specialists proposed to conduct the initial run of security testing to establish baseline and then scheduled tests.
- Carry out performance testing for every major release.
- Due to the insignificant test automation, the consultants recommended using unit testing coverage information to detect areas requiring test automation and its adoption as a common practice.
- Consistently gather and analyze customer feedback.
- Because of the heavy release cycle – review and adjust release management and release schedule.
Infrastructure
- Use a test case management system and develop terms of use or user guide.
- Because of the chaotic bug tracking, the a1qa specialists recommended to consolidate bug tracking in JIRA across the board and standardize PM software company-wide.
- As there was no single QA knowledge, the experts advised creating a knowledge base for each product and integrate Atlassian Confluence with JIRA.
Environment
- Because of the unstructured testing environment, the a1qa specialists recommended to set up a staging environment for ready-to-ship version access for sign-off.
- To avoid chaotic deployment and continuous integration environment, the consultants proposed to adopt and integrate CI with unit tests and automated tests.
Technologies & tools
- Interviewing
- Excel
- Brainstorming
- PowerPoint
Results
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a1qa prepared a document with the detailed fact-based results of the assessment, a broad list of executable recommendations and the roadmap for their implementation.
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During the final presentation, the client said he was completely satisfied with the results and got a clear picture of the current state of things in the company regarding QA processes.
In numbers
1.2
person-months in project efforts
1
month of the project duration
100%
compliance with timeline and budget terms