The Client
The client dominates the American market as the premier newsroom software company since the year 2000 with custom products servicing the needs of the entire newsroom. The company based in the Virgin Islands works in close proximity to research and develop custom functions to meet the ever-evolving needs of workstations around the world.
The Situation
With flexibility and a wealth of features in mind, the client’s chief software is designed as an all-in-one solution for the newsroom and as such demands high-level integration between software programs such as media players, teleprompters, browsers, calendars and a text editor to list a few. At the early development stages, Quality House is called in for testing of new functionalities to be implemented in the overall software system.
The Challenge
To release a user-friendly and intuitive product on the market, Quality House operatives on the project had to establish a firm understanding of how a single day in the newsroom progressed to determine how to test the functionalities. Second, we had to anticipate the needs of journalists interacting with the software. Given the projects’ ambitious scope, the QA team assigned had to maintain long-term testing, which brought communication challenges given the geographic location of the client and the Quality House team.
As this was a long-term project, Quality House had to establish a dedicated team in our office with a team leader in charge of micromanagement and communication with the QA manager for the project on the Virgin Islands. The project itself brought a load of cyclical nature with spring and fall being work-heavy. This called for a constant team expansion and constriction to meet the work load, where Quality House had to always provide trained staff knowledgeable about the project and maintain operatives in reserve to join at a later point. Couple with the different time zones, the project caused additional stain on communication.
As this was a long-term project, Quality House had to establish a dedicated team in our office with a team leader in charge of micromanagement and communication with the QA manager for the project on the Virgin Islands. The project itself brought a load of cyclical nature with spring and fall being work-heavy. This called for a constant team expansion and constriction to meet the work load, where Quality House had to always provide trained staff knowledgeable about the project and maintain operatives in reserve to join at a later point. Couple with the different time zones, the project caused additional stain on communication.
The Objective
Functional testing ranked first as an initial objective in the early project stages. Quality House soon overtook the creation of test plans and test cases, test plan executions, bug logging and the verifications for software for both the desktop version as well as the mobile/web application. As a direct result, another objective became the introduction of thorough test automation for every functionality and the testing of different search technologies – indexing, WSS. Back end testing was also introduced to test on the servers’ programs needed for the major one to work.
The Solution
The first step in this project was to read and analyze all provided documentation before the team moved onto creating a test case, test plans (full, regression and smoke), and test estimations. This was accomplished with the Waterflow methodology, but during subsequent stages, Quality House switched to using Scrum as the team’s responsibilities grew in number.
Once we established the project framework and chief goals, the team initiated work on functional testing of the numerous functionalities, back end testing, performance testing, automation testing, acceptance testing, integration testing, smoke testing, regression testing and testing on different devices including Win, Android and iOS. The team performed test case execution on Used tools TFS, Visual Studio and Selenium.
All servers were moved in Azure, where Quality House had automated and secured backups. To further increase productivity and streamline the process, we implemented a cloud snapshotting functionality.
Once we established the project framework and chief goals, the team initiated work on functional testing of the numerous functionalities, back end testing, performance testing, automation testing, acceptance testing, integration testing, smoke testing, regression testing and testing on different devices including Win, Android and iOS. The team performed test case execution on Used tools TFS, Visual Studio and Selenium.
All servers were moved in Azure, where Quality House had automated and secured backups. To further increase productivity and streamline the process, we implemented a cloud snapshotting functionality.
The Conclusion
Quality House maintained a healthy pace and solid work ethic for three years to assist in testing this software until it was polished enough to release. The client received detailed reports on the work performed during the 3-year period, wherein in our team fixed bugs and improved overall functions performance. The finished system has been in operation for several years now and in use all over the world.