The Client
An American software company operating on the market since 2001, which opens three office spaces in Bulgaria as part of its workforce expansion strategy. The client creates mobile apps abridging different industries and seeks to establish presence in the European region. Its main focus falls on adapting new technologies to current challenges and present their own clients with streamlined solutions.
The Situation
The US Educational System measures its students’ aptitude levels in core school subjects such as Math and English through tests. In recent years, a demand for an efficient and user-friendly system arises, which not only performs said tests, but also summarizes the results afterwards. To answer this need, the client develops a custom platform, consisting of two integral parts – a web interface with responsive design for performing tests, complete with additional features for students with disabilities, and a web-based easy to apply and maintain administrative part that distributes tests to the students and summarizes the results. The tests are performed on a variety of devices via a single purpose Secure Browser also developed by the client. This browser has limited functionalities in order to deny cheating.
The Challenge
Given the project size and divide between staff the US and Bulgaria, clear communication has ranked a top priority for achieving successful collaboration between Quality House operatives assigned on the validation team and the client’s team. Additional time constraints derive from the time zone difference, which further prolonged the testing process, and the strict deadlines matched to the start of the American school year.
The Objective
The scope of the project consisted of developing and deploying the system for several states and their schools with each state having access to different customizations made according to the client’s requirements. These customizations ranged from types of tests to additional rights and permission for school staff operating the system. The main objective was to maintain a single baseline, but also not mix up the different customizations.
The second chief objective was to implement a responsive design as the system would mainly be used on tablet devices. The tests themselves are not basic multiple choice questions as they feature drag-and-drop boxes, audio, video and even voice recording tasks. All of these had to operate perfectly on any device.
The second chief objective was to implement a responsive design as the system would mainly be used on tablet devices. The tests themselves are not basic multiple choice questions as they feature drag-and-drop boxes, audio, video and even voice recording tasks. All of these had to operate perfectly on any device.
The Solution
Quality House operatives established a detailed test plan to assist the client’s team in the work and executed systematically step after step to ensure the system’s performance and responses are just as envisioned. This called for a detailed test automation process to be developed and employed to ease the testing process and exclude human error. All bugs found during testing were submitted in detail and validated after being fixed. Furthermore, the QA team worked on all incoming change requests to make all subsequent modifications done fit seamlessly into the workflow.
Quality Assurance consisted of 11 team members who used SQL Server Management Studio, Jenkins, InteliJ Idea and Oracle VM Virtual Box in the course of the project. Jira served as the main bug tracking tool. Assigned Software Test Engineers overtook the writing and validating test scenarios and test scripts and performing tests on different OSs including mobile devices and VMs.
Quality Assurance consisted of 11 team members who used SQL Server Management Studio, Jenkins, InteliJ Idea and Oracle VM Virtual Box in the course of the project. Jira served as the main bug tracking tool. Assigned Software Test Engineers overtook the writing and validating test scenarios and test scripts and performing tests on different OSs including mobile devices and VMs.
The Conclusion
The final product has been a resounding success with the client and the public as it’s currently applied across 7 states, with other states soon to embrace the platform as well. Quality House was able to implement a test management system to further along the QA process and adopt a custom test automation, specifically adapted for the needs of mobile technologies.