The customer, a major producer of communications software, developed a web-based conferencing system. a1qa was engaged to evaluate the system's quality before its release.

The tested solution is a web-based conferencing system. The principal features of the system are:

• Support of a variety of OS/browsers/Java machines.
• Close integration with operating systems: additional components are installed into the execution environment.
• Various means of audio information transmitting via the telephone network (PSTN) and Internet (packet transmission).

The a1qa team had to provide:

• Testing of the system using different combinations of browsers and Java machines.
• Testing of the system and its components on various operating systems (at the system administrator level).
• Creation of a depository of virtual machines for full coverage of the required environments.
• Automated testing of several mechanisms of the application.
• Testing of the audio component of the system — separate and parallel with the web portion.

To ensure execution of all the required tests and the system quality, the following testing activities were necessary for the runtime environments:

• Thorough functional testing.
• GUI testing. Besides standard GUI tests, there was a need in testing under different languages/locales along with checking for correctness of controls positioning and a check of the content at the basic linguistic level.
• Usability testing.
• Performance testing. In order to appraise the stability and quality of the audio component of the system, performance tests were held using both the human resource and software generators of the necessary activity.
• Automated testing. It included automation of cyclic mechanisms and the generation of data to speed up the testing process.

Poor resistance of audio components of the system:

• The team ran a number of performance tests.

The system not supporting several OSs or Java machines:

• Specialists performed GUI, usability, and functional automated tests.