When the a1qa QA lead joined the team, it was as if she had never left the project. She understood all the features we had added, produced correct documentation, ran the triage meetings effectively, and researched issues quickly. Bottom line: her transition was seamless!
She is effective in the written and verbal word. She communicates difficult concepts in an easy to understand way. Her soothing personality reflects in a very calm approach to all issues. She demonstrates active listening and extracts the right details to move an issue forward. This is extremely important when we are triaging issues and not everyone in the meeting understands the issues we are trying to correct.
UX team decision-maker
The client represents a family of companies that serves the public and affordable housing community with special, niche insurance programs as well as other value-added products and services.
The developed SaaS ERP solution covered the following processes run by Public Housing Authorities (PHAs) in regards to the provisioning of affordable housing across the USA:
To meet all quality requirements, the a1qa team considered time-to-market criteria, product specifics, and target audience to deliver a custom-tailored package of quality assurance services.
Testing activities differed over time and depended upon the development stage. Thus, the booming growth of functionality was accompanied by thorough functional testing, alongside with performance testing and test automation.
Later on, UX audit was added to improve end-users’ satisfaction.
Right before the product was shipped to market, end-to-end tests were carried out to assess the software market readiness.
The a1qa team was to meet a whole lot of multiple requirements.
It was vital to make sure everything was taken into account.
As an effective means of doing this, the team implemented a cross-reviewing stage, for which the unique Test Case Matrix and Component Matrix were applied.
To avoid overlapping of test cases, the Test Case Matrix was introduced. It helped a reviewer understand whether all the requirements were considered by test cases. It also served to:
At times, when the functionality was changed it required test cases to be updated.
The Component Matrix was applied to simplify and accelerate the process. It contained all Test Case Matrixes with test cases for the appropriate component of the system.
The a1qa technical writers were asked to design and update a comprehensive suite of reference documentation. The documents had to take into account numerous peculiarities of the system and cover all the functionality.
The team did a great job and was loaded with the following tasks:
Throughout the project, the a1qa technical writers prepared over 90 documents with the total number of 1000+ pages.
The product was concisely documented. The client highly valued the responsive and personalized approach backed by considerable expertise to deliver targeted documentation for all requirements.
Before every new release rollout, the QA team performed user acceptance testing according to the scenarios prepared by the business analyst and product owner.
Based on them, QA engineers were to prepare a suite of test cases. Its creation was to be quick and smooth, and test scenarios were not to be changed for every UAT.
To consider all the above-mentioned criteria, the a1qa team developed UAT scenarios that covered all the general user flows and possible introduction of new functionality.
Later on, all the quick sanity tests and BAS (Business Analysts Scenarios) were automated. The behavior of every feature in these scenarios was specified.
The QA team complemented them and passed over to the test automation team.
For every feature testing there was at least one automated test, which helped to save 3 hours on testing every feature from the UAT suite.
Initially, the Scrum methodology was implemented to develop the project. However, after several years of development, it was decided to migrate to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) cut for large enterprises and enabling them to manage software development across multiple teams more efficiently.
The a1qa team had to gain a deep understanding of the underlying values and principles of SAFe development.
The most obvious benefits of agile scaling turned out to be the following: synchronized work of all teams and faster delivery of the final product.
In terms of the performance testing services on the project, the a1qa team carried out the full cycle of activities using MS Visual Studio.
The a1qa engineers created the profile of the target audience and set up the process of collaboration with the developers.
It helped trace the issues in the performance of the system and promptly fix them, thus, improving the overall quality.
Initially, there was one QA team on the project (2 engineers and 1 team lead specialist).
Timely applied scalability of manpower helped deliver high-quality results on all stages of the project fulfillment and in compliance with the necessary set of activities at the given period.
Therefore, at the time the needs were covered by seven teams composed of multiple specialists, from QA project coordinators and project managers to tech writers and UX experts.
Today, the a1qa team on the project is curtailed to three specialists who provide product support validating bugs fixing and testing additional features implemented upon users’ requests.
Almost 30 thousand test cases to support. To cut down the number of test cases, some improvements were introduced:
Large scope of regression testing:
Testing in two branches:
The lack of communication between BAs, the Dev, and the QA:
