Manual Testing for Business Services Tech Firm
- Application Testing
- $50,000 to $199,999
- June 2016 - Ongoing
- Quality
- 4.0
- Schedule
- 4.5
- Cost
- 4.5
- Willing to Refer
- 4.0
"Their team is very organized, especially when it comes to using complicated applications like ours."
- Other industries
- Groningen, Netherlands
- 1-10 Employees
- Phone Interview
- Verified
QA Madness provides manual testing for a co-browsing chat solution. Project engineers identify bugs offer valuable second opinions related to different browsers and devices.
Switching from automated testing to manual testing has improved the quality of final products. They are skilled enough to handle a complicated solution with multiple user types, and they are thorough and creative when it comes to testing methods.
A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.
BACKGROUND
Introduce your business and what you do there.
We offer a more proactive chat solution to customers visiting websites, through something called browsing. It’s a useful tool for people visiting online stores or other websites, and need help finalizing purchases. They can chat with the agents, but also share their screens, in order to receive guidance on how to fill out a form, which buttons to click, and so on. The solution is applicable in all kinds of contexts, but it can be especially helpful for government organizations and large companies which that have less user-friendly websites. We are located in The Netherlands, with a part of our dev team being based in Spain. I am a member of the coding team and handle a mixture of backend and frontend development, as well as platform operations.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
What challenge were you trying to address with QA Madness?
We were changing the way in which we were working, and tried to speed up our development process. At the time, we realized that we had a number of tools for automating almost everything related to development, code-sharing, testing, and deployment. The missing part in all of this was having some kind of human testing. Unit testing is nice for identifying bugs, and so if functional testing, for determining if all parts in the system are working correctly with each other, but we also wanted human testing, so the manager of our company brought QA Madness in.
SOLUTION
What was the scope of their involvement?
QA Madness provided testing not only for discovering bugs, but also as a means of having a different view on the new features we were building. Whenever we decide to design and build something, one of the steps will be to have a different set of eyes look at that feature, and give us feedback. QA Madness can provide recommendations on how we can improve features, make screens more intuitive for customers, and have simpler approaches to development.
If I’m not mistaken, QA Madness is doing testing through an online platform which covers all desktop browsers, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari. They are also testing for mobile devices, namely the native browsers on Android and iOS.
How did you come to work with QA Madness?
I believe that the leader of our company was looking for a testing team online, and found QA Madness. I was not involved in the selection process, but I inherited this relationship.
How much have you invested with QA Madness?
I don’t have this information.
What is the status of this engagement?
We started working with QA Madness almost two years ago.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?
We have moved away from an automated workflow. Whenever we made a new change in the code, it would be pushed automatically to our repositories, after which it would have unit testing performed, and be deployed. We experienced some issues with this workflow, so we are working together with QA Madness in order to test everything for errors and stability. We have implemented a new rollback tool which can undo any new features or bug fixes. We perform manual testing before each new release, and also test the rollback tool, ensuring that everything is okay in terms of previous and current versions.
The stability and security of our releases has increased a lot in the past two months, and we haven’t had any issues with new releases. We have one new release every week, which means that we are moving fast in terms of development, fixing bugs and releasing new features.
How did QA Madness perform from a project management standpoint?
We are working closely with the testing team itself through our Slack instance, which is a Skype-like application for communication. We have daily chats around the features to be tested, any reported bugs, and changes to the testing environment. For meetings, we use Zoom, which is similar to Google Hangouts. It allows us to share screens and have daily standups, and interview QA Madness’ resources.
As far as I know, our managers had conversations with members of QA Madness and assigned one person to work with us. After that, we had a couple of meetings with their manager and tester, and went through interviews and evaluations. The initial tester left the company, but a new resource was introduced to us before that happened, making the transition smooth. I don’t know if we were able to interview all the members of our testing team.
I haven’t looked at QA Madness’ reports. I believe that they are received by the company leader or someone else on our side.
What did you find most impressive about QA Madness?
This is the first company of its kind I’ve worked with, so I cannot compare QA Madness to anyone else. Their team is very organized, especially when it comes to using complicated applications like ours, with different accounts, users, and passwords. We didn’t have any issues with lost passwords on their side, which is a common occurrence for us.
QA Madness is also very detailed in terms of work. They perform different kinds of crazy things during testing, in order to break the software and get errors, like turning off the internet connection while performing a task. Over the past couple of years, QA Madness has helped us detect a number of strange user behaviors. In the end, we won’t know how good the software is until it’s released publicly, and users start doing crazy things with it. We appreciate QA Madness’ work, since this is the way to really test software. At some point, we will be introducing a new type of automatic and functional testing. We like to have this between different stages like testing, staging, production, private clouds, and so on. Our private cloud is similar to the production environment, but with more restrictions around security and data protection. Some of our customers need this kind of extra protection. We plan to introduce a new kind of automatic integration between these different stages, and already have a person from QA Madness’ side working with us, and learning the new technology, not only in order to test that everything is working fine, but to also convert the tests into real code that we can use. They will help us build the piece of software for performing this automatic integration and functional testing.
Are there any areas QA Madness could improve?
Since they are a growing company, improving knowledge around the software and technologies we’re using, specifically around HTML and security. We want to offer the best and most secure features to customers, so this is always a good offer. QA Madness could make suggestions related to security issues they identified in the latest version of Chrome, which could affect our platform, for example. It would be the perfect improvement to them.
RATINGS
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Quality
4.0Service & Deliverables
-
Schedule
4.5On time / deadlines
"<p>QA Madness is always willing to help us, especially around deadlines, even outside of working hours. There is some space to improve, but I’m very happy for now.</p> "
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Cost
4.5Value / within estimates
"<p>Everyone’s happy with them, and the work QA Madness is doing for us. They have always helped us find and fix bugs, and have suggested ways in which to test and improve features before they go out to customers.</p> "
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Willing to Refer
4.0NPS