The client is an airline company offering booking, check-in, travel guides, bonus programs, and other services through web and mobile applications. With destinations to more than 100 countries, they possess an extensive client database.
The enterprise is continuously growing and enhancing the software to comply with market requirements and enlarge the scope of provided assistance.
Wanting to deliver top-notch software products and smoothly introduce updates to the applications, the client chose a1qa to assure the quality of all upcoming solutions.
The company had no internal software development department and involved third-party providers. However, the quality of delivered software and the ways of managing projects weren’t up to par on account of the client’s team lacking operational efficiency. This negatively affected end-user satisfaction and placed a heavy burden on the C-level.
So, when a1qa joined the project, it started with QA consulting and assigned QA consulting experts who performed 5 key steps:
a1qa’s team defined the roles of specialists to analyze, compiled questionnaires to interview them, created a communication framework and a road map describing an accurate sequence of actions.
During a one-week onsite visit to the client, a1qa’s consultants examined the current infrastructure and processes, reviewed existing artifacts, interviewed client’s project managers, and ensured that the gathered data was complete and correct.
Over a period of one month, a1qa’s team analyzed the information, determined critical process flaws, prioritized the order of fixing them, and developed an implementation and maintenance plan.
a1qa’s experts made a second visit to present the approach to project stakeholders and receive their approval.
a1qa’s team set up deadlines and provided required assistance during the adoption of process enhancements.
As a result, these key process issues were defined during the audit:
To overcome them, a1qa suggested that the client:
These advancements were to minimize the impact of sudden software changes on the overall quality of the products and ensure their proper operation.
So, after thorough QA consulting, a1qa’s team got down to implementing the improvements and supported the client in performing the following QA activities:
Before developing any new feature, the a1qa engineers started with careful requirements testing to ensure that there were no inconsistencies in business logic and to avoid duplicated work.
After a thorough exploration of the new functionality, the a1qa team wrote test documentation to make sure every use case was tested properly.
Once the new feature was developed, the a1qa specialists performed rigorous manual testing based on test documentation to verify the software was working as per requirements and without any single defect.
The client wanted to ensure equally great software operation for all users. For that, the a1qa team conducted cross-browser testing on the most popular browsers and their versions (Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Safari for iPhone, Google Chrome for Android, etc.).
The solutions were intended to be used by people all over the world. It was vital to make sure both the web portal and mobile applications were customized as per the targeted linguistic and cultural specifics of diverse countries. The a1qa engineers carried out localization testing of the software and its new features for 8 languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese).
The a1qa specialists introduced regression testing in the early SDLC stages to prevent defects leakage to production and confirm that the latest code changes hadn’t negatively affected the smoothly running functionality.
Ensuring the quality of API requests concerned part of the testing efforts. However, the responses they returned were very extensive, sometimes comprising more than 50,000 lines. Manually checking their quality became an overwhelming task.
That’s why a1qa assigned cross-functional QA engineers who were responsible for introducing test automation.
As a first step toward its realization, they performed a pilot project. For that, the specialists:
The client was satisfied with the results of the pilot project, so a1qa’s team continued with further automation of API testing by running daily verifications. The experts checked the interaction of endpoints and made sure that obtained responses were in line with the sent requests.
As a result, test automation significantly accelerated QA activities — a one-week scope was covered in only 1 hour.
The a1qa team aimed to provide clear visibility of the product quality. They prepared quality reports highlighting all software bottlenecks and critical issues to be fixed. It helped the project team to prioritize the tasks, meet the release deadlines, and verify that no critical bugs would survive late into the lifecycle.
This approach allowed the client to carry out hassle-free releases, save time (as the development had been always starting with clear requirements), and have a transparent understanding of the products’ quality.
Also, a1qa was responsible for the software testing of the web, iOS, and Android applications and their updates related to bonus programs, redesigning, and the enlargement of the services provided to the users.
