vTEST

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the owner of a software development firm, mostly focusing on mobile development. 

What challenge were you trying to address with vTEST?

They’ve been in charge of our QA work.

What was the scope of their involvement?

vTEST has handled all the QA work for our mobile applications. Their primary job is to catch bugs on the user experience and backend sides. We’re not very sophisticated in terms of development. We are using 2 testers and a supervisor, who also handles about 10% of the work.

How did you come to work with vTEST?

One of our employees had worked with vTEST before for another company. They were in the right place at the right time.

How much have you invested with vTEST?

The cost of their work is between $3,000 and $5,000 per month.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with vTEST in October of 2016. We have an ongoing relationship. 

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or impact of the engagement?

Our typical projects are difficult and involve multiple parties. No one is ever happy with the service provider. Clients feel that they’re overpaying, while we feel that our time is getting stolen. As long as I don’t get too much pushback from clients, I’m happy. vTEST is a competent group, and I’ve never had any issues with them.

At the end of the day, the work is multifactorial, and it’s hard to attribute success to them. vTEST can find bugs, but our aim is to work on not getting them in the first place. They have reduced the potential of getting yelled at by clients on my side.

How did vTEST perform from a project management standpoint?

We work directly with the testers, who send reports that serve our purposes. They’re fairly robust and provide a way for us to cover ourselves.

What did you find most impressive about vTEST?

They’re thorough, and they make up many user stories.

Are there any areas vTEST could improve?

No, vTEST is good at what they do, in my experience. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

flightSpeak is a mobile-app company focusing on building a universal consumer airport app. We cover 326 airports in 16 countries, and aim to reduce traveling stress by providing information like wait times and great places to eat, shop, and suggestions for parents. On the enterprise side, we provide content management and BI solutions for airport marketing professionals. We close the loop by leveraging the app and understanding the data generated by our service.

What challenge were you trying to address with vTEST?

They have been our testing partner for a 1½–2 years.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The flightSpeak app which is live and available today is the product we’ve been working on with vTEST over the last 2 years. The app and the subsequent features we’ve built for it have been made in partnership with their team.

vTEST has been integral in ensuring the quality of our software and how it’s shipped to the marketplace. We treat them as a team member among our development team and always include them in the process early-on. We’ve found this to be beneficial to the quality of the testing process.

vTEST takes part in the design and spec development phases, as well as the code-writing itself, instead of us leaving tests until the last moment. They have helped us design around some test-related challenges, and involve themselves in the spec'ing process by writing unit test cases for each scenario we write a spec for. Finally, they provide high-quality Q&As around the items we are thinking about building in order to raise the quality of the software.

Their primary focus has been the app itself. We are using the Ionic framework, and have also worked with vTEST on some shorter native iOS and Android projects. I work directly with the owner of the company, which comes from a combination of the length and quality of our relationship, and to a certain extent the fact that he enjoys working directly with our product.

How did you come to work with vTEST?

I was introduced to them by a developer friend. We considered 2 Indian firms, but we did not keep the first one due to the quality of the engagement. vTEST was the second one, and we continued working with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with vTEST in September 2015. They’re still our testing partner.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

For us, everything boils down to shipping on time. The quality of our engagement with vTEST has helped with the low-end of the bug count, as well as with the bugs carried over to release. As we continued to work on communication, better spec-writing, and questions, we ended up catching more QA issues prior to shipping the product. Much of this has played into the successful ongoing implementation of our partnership. There are hard metrics to dig up when it comes to testing quality, but it’s hard to separate that from development quality. I boil it down to the number of bugs shipped per release, the number of bugs caught, and how the quality of the product evolved over time.

It would be difficult to say how much we’ve improved, but the key thing is that we’ve brought vTEST in as an equal member into our processes and conversations. Many companies bring testing in at the end of the process, which is not the best approach in terms of quality. Overall, we’ve evolved as a team. The testing has helped the development get better, and the development has helped the spec-writing get better — we’re working as a very strong unit.

How did vTEST perform from a project management standpoint?

The collaboration was definitely not a one-way street. We have a development model which incorporates vTEST into our team, and there’s a lot of back and forth which has led to a higher-quality product and better engagement.

What did you find most impressive about vTEST?

The quality of communication has been very high. I’ve worked with vTEST’s founder himself and found his level of client focus to be great. I never found that I couldn’t get a hold of vTEST or that the communication was poor. This has been one of the main reasons for maintaining the relationship.

Are there any areas vTEST could improve?

We have brought them in as a team member for retrospectives after each release and have been able to point out things which could be improved. Having the flexibility to consistently improve is important to us. We ship every three weeks or so, and we’re all making corrections to our performance during those periods, from quality of communication to availability and how often we have international calls. To point out one thing would be to say that it hasn’t been worked on. We’ve been very aware of our shortcomings, and have worked together to take care of them.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

MyCareer.com is a startup based out of Edison, New Jersey, and we have a branch office in Vizag, India. We are a startup focused on the HR [human resources] domain. In May, we went live with our product, and we are trying to acquire customers at this stage. Currently, including myself and my co-founder, we have around ten plus people at MyCareer. I am the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer. I’m responsible for the delivery of the product.

What challenge were you trying to address with vTEST?

We primarily had developers in our team. Being a startup, we were trying to get things going quickly, and we had a very lean team. At that time, we had around three or four people. We had sought help from vTEST to get our testing done. They were involved in testing our application end to end.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The testing involved manual testing primarily. We were on a two-week sprint, so as the developers revealed a new functionality, we would mark that as complete, and at different parts in the project life cycle, we had different QA [quality assurance] specialists. At some point in time, we had around three QA folks from vTEST who were picking out user stories that were completed by the developers and testing them manually. This included testing our search engine and also checking transactional stuff such as purchasing of a resume and ensuring that the contact information is displayed. Also, once it is purchased, the recruiter who is purchasing those is able to transact in whichever way they wanted, whether it’s sending an email or sending a broadcast message and so on and so forth. vTEST was involved in all of this testing, including verifying at the backend that the user has signed up, the information is getting stored properly, and that new users that are to be associated with an organization are also associated properly. That is, in short, what we were trying to do, and that’s how vTEST was helping us in our effort.

How did you come to work with vTEST?

We found vTEST through a person that I knew who has worked with them before. That’s how I was introduced. Once we were introduced, I talked to them and took some time together to plan the resources, the duration, and scope among other things. That’s how we got started.

How much have you invested with vTEST?

I would say around $30,000 to $40,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in June or July of 2015. We completed the sprint with them in April or May of 2016. We do not use them for testing services anymore, but in the future, we might. Currently, we are in user acquisition mode. We have stabilized the product and are not adding any new features right now.

How did vTEST perform from a project management standpoint?

At the outset, I was very clear on my expectations that I would be the project/product manager for this. However, there was a single point person, and my style is a little different. I would rather work with the testers or developers directly and get the work done, and if there was any escalation point, I would get Shak [Hanjgikar, vTEST Director] involved, who is the head over there. On a weekly basis, I also had a touchpoint to ensure that any concerns that I had were raised. We had a weekly touchpoint where we were reviewing some bugs and some suggestions that I had around improvement and also adherence to the process I pointed out, and they were able to quickly pick it up and then add that into whatever my requirement was.

What did you find most impressive about vTEST?

In terms of being able to come up with the test cases based on the use case documentation that was done, they were pretty thorough from that perspective. I liked that, even without me asking, they were able to come up with the whole test scenarios, the test cases, and so on.

Are there any areas vTEST could improve?

Initially, there was much more of inner processing work, and also some areas where they were recording defects just for the sake of tracking metrics. However, our bandwidth is limited and we cannot track all of these metrics. I would rather have a quality product. Since then, they have adjusted, and we were able to move along well.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are a digital consultancy, blending strategy, creativity and engineering to innovate meaningful digital solutions that get to the heart of what your customers need and want. I am the Director for its Offshore Software Development Centre at Pune, India.

For what projects/services did your company hire vTEST?

Mobile and Web Application Testing

What were your goals for this project?

We needed to augment the application testing capabilities and ramp up in a short period of time

How did you select this vendor?

I searched for Software Testing companies online and came across Vtest. They seem to have checked all the boxes on the requirements & expectations that Mobiquity had from this partner.

Describe the project in detail.

The client is a convenience store chain primarily located in the Midwestern United States. Scope of work was to enhance the digital footprint and develop Web / Mobile applications for this client

What was the team composition?

This was a large program with distributed teams.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The engagement with vtest was for a staff augmented resourcing model

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

vtest resources performed optimally, conducted themselves with a high standard and professionalism.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their expertise in testing services was impressive. They have well-trained and professional staff.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Nothing that I can suggest