Client Overview
Our client is a software solutions provider based in Western Europe, delivering a complex enterprise-grade application serving critical business operations for over a decade. The application, utilized across various industries including finance and logistics, features a robust but extensive legacy codebase. Over time, this complexity has increased due to ongoing enhancements, resulting in numerous existing bugs and challenges in maintaining software quality and accelerating development cycles.
Challenges
The project presented significant testing and quality assurance challenges due to the application’s lengthy production history and complexity. The core difficulties included:
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An extensive legacy codebase spanning over 10 years, introducing numerous accumulated bugs and inconsistencies.
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Complex features requiring rigorous testing, making bug identification and resolution challenging.
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Slow release cycles due to inefficient testing processes, negatively impacting delivery timelines and product stability.
Solution
To tackle these challenges, our team implemented a comprehensive QA strategy aimed at speeding up releases while enhancing the application’s quality:
- Regular Manual Testing Sessions: Introduced consistent manual testing periods within each release cycle, significantly enhancing issue detection and overall software stability.
- QA Integration into Ticket Refining: Embedded QA experts into the development process early on during ticket refinement sessions, enabling early identification and mitigation of potential issues before reaching development.
- Priority-Based Bug Resolution: Implemented a priority system for bugs, ensuring that blocker and critical-priority issues received immediate attention and prompt fixes from the development team, thereby reducing project management overhead.
- Test Case Management Tool: Introduced a dedicated test case management tool, making test cases more transparent for management, ensuring visibility into test progress, and allowing stakeholders to track quality assurance efforts more effectively.
- Cloud-Based Parallel Testing: Conducted automated test runs in parallel using cloud-based solutions, twice per release cycle. This approach drastically reduced the feedback time and accelerated the overall testing process.
- Adoption of Industry Best Practices: Leveraged industry best practices to design tests with minimal maintenance requirements, further enhancing test stability and reducing the overhead associated with test updates and maintenance.
- Comprehensive API Testing: In addition to standard end-to-end tests, introduced a robust set of API tests (5000+), running in parallel under 25 minutes to proactively identify backend issues early in the development cycle.
- Focused Automation: Dedicated QA efforts toward automating tests for critical parts of newly developed features, significantly improving regression test coverage and reliability.
- Enhanced Reporting Capabilities: Improved the clarity and usability of test reports, allowing teams to quickly analyze results, prioritize tasks efficiently, and respond rapidly to critical issues.
Results
Through these initiatives, our team significantly improved the efficiency and effectiveness of the client’s testing and quality assurance processes, enabling faster releases with enhanced reliability and stability. The release cycles became smaller, transitioning from one major release every several months to multiple releases per month. Additionally, the average number of support issues and the necessity for emergency hotfixes significantly decreased, demonstrating clear improvements in software quality and operational reliability.