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Full-spectrum QA support for a leading online gaming operator
a1qa was contacted to accelerate release cadence, ensure faultless operation, and boost performance of sports betting software.
Overview
Overall, a1qa has been instrumental in accelerating our release cadence from monthly to weekly, freeing up resources to speed up migration and enabling roadmap-driven development. Over our 7+ years of collaboration, their QA specialists have become an integral part of our operations, delivering high-quality testing, meeting deadlines, and supporting us with a proactive attitude. Their expertise, reliability, and seamless handling of releases make them a trusted and valued QA partner.
CIO
The client is a technology company that develops and maintains the software and platforms used for the global online and retail betting and gaming operations. It provides the technological backbone for sports betting, casino games, and other gambling products, with a focus on creating a seamless and secure user experience. The company’s in-house development strategy allows it to build proprietary platforms and risk management tools, supporting expansion and product innovation in the international market.
Their software represented a comprehensive, full-spectrum B2B system designed to deliver a unified and secure environment for all customer-facing applications. Its in-house technological infrastructure is engineered to provide a seamless, user-friendly experience across multiple channels and devices.
The client strove to increase market share across the USA and UK, accelerate release cadence with the long-term goal of achieving one-day production deployments, and improve customer experience by delivering highly reliable, seamless, and engaging software that could support sustainable growth and strengthen brand loyalty.
Services offered
Functional testing
Performance testing
Test automation
Regression testing
Project scope
a1qa quickly onboarded the team with the required level of competencies, delved into the client’s Scrum-based infrastructure and processes to ensure seamless integration, established an effective communication framework, and performed the following activities.
Functional testing
The team commenced with test case design, creating detailed and well-structured scenarios to support both current and future testing cycles. Based on these, they performed new feature testing to verify that added functionality integrated smoothly with existing workflows and regression testing to safeguard against unintended side effects of ongoing development, maintaining high software stability. In addition, a1qa executed exploratory testing, covering edge-case scenarios specific to betting and gaming workflows, to spot potential issues beyond standard coverage. All defects were validated to ensure accurate reporting and resolution.
Performance testing
The client’s platform frequently experiences high loads due to a large and active user base, making performance testing a critical and ongoing activity. Every new feature underwent rigorous assessment to ensure it could handle peak traffic, maintain responsiveness, and deliver a seamless experience for both existing and new users.
a1qa’s engineers were involved in all performance-related tasks, setting up robust testing environments, developing scripts to simulate high traffic, and stressing the system to evaluate capacity and stability under load. This approach allowed potential bottlenecks to be identified early, ensuring that new features scale effectively, and the platform maintains reliable operation under real-world conditions.
Test automation
The client had a significant volume of regression, smoke, and stability testing (to confirm that the environments were test-ready and could be confidently utilized in QA workflows), which created a strong need for test automation support.
Initially, the client’s test automation framework posed several challenges: it lacked consistency, was put together quickly, and didn’t consider scalability. a1qa’s specialists had to refine and standardize it to create a unified, reliable structure. Beyond this foundational work, the team contributed by developing new automated tests in C# and providing ongoing support for the established ecosystem.
As the project expanded, a1qa introduced a team working with mobile devices and began developing a new automation segment specifically for them. For this part of the project, specialists leveraged the internal Aquality Mobile framework, complemented by Aquality Tracking, which includes AI algorithms that summarize and analyze test failures. This allowed QA to scale effectively while maintaining visibility into test results and ensuring overall solution reliability.
As a result of a1qa’s involvement, testing speed increased substantially. For example, within one subproject group, the experts developed a dedicated suite of automated tests: regression automation covered 106 test cases, and smoke automation covered 20 test cases. Considering that each manual test case took 15 minutes, smoke testing was accelerated by 300 minutes (5 hours), and regression testing accelerated by 1,590 minutes (26.5 hours). This approach reduced the time spent on repetitive manual testing and improved reliability and coverage across the entire platform.
What’s more, during the project a1qa successfully overcame two major challenges.
The first one is related to moving test automation into development ownership. In terms of the testing pyramid, the existing test automation was primarily focused on GUI and API levels. To achieve a one-day release cycle, the client wanted to perform all assessments at the unit-test level. However, the challenge with that method was that automated tests at such a granular level could degrade over time, potentially slowing release cadence or affecting overall software quality.
To support the client in reaching this goal, a1qa developed specialized metrics for tracking progress on a monthly basis. They measured cycle time per story and the number of defects in production. Story point velocity served as an objective indicator of development speed which related to cadence, while production defects provided a measure of quality. a1qa also implemented reporting, giving stakeholders visibility into trends and enabling proactive action in case of any issues. This allowed for ongoing monitoring of efficiency and quality, providing actionable insights to guide the client toward their release objectives.
In addition, a1qa’s QA engineers delivered customized training for the client’s testers and developers. A series of 6 1-hour tailored learning sessions was designed to help participants gain a deeper understanding of how automation works and empower them to independently create, run, and manage automated tests moving forward.
The training combined explanations, live demos, and hands-on practice. It began with simple examples, gradually progressing to writing and debugging automated tests, and culminated in a final session focused on the project’s actual testing framework, including how to develop and integrate new tests into it.
A total of three groups completed the program — 70+ people overall — gaining practical experience and confidence in working with the automation tools used on the project.
The second challenge a1qa faced was environment instability. For the client, achieving a 100% pass rate — excluding functional defects — was the main goal. If a test failed because of an actual issue, that was acceptable; however, failures caused by unstable environments were not (e.g., unavailable services, longer-than-expected response times, pages that didn’t load as quickly as required). As a result, maintaining the test suite became increasingly difficult.
To address this, a1qa significantly reduced the number of UI tests and shifted focus toward API verifications. This transition greatly improved the overall stability and reliability of the automated testing process.
Technologies & tools
- C#
- Jira
- TestRail
- Confluence
- Fiddler
- Charles
- Reqnroll
- Jenkins
- NUnit
- xUnit
- Appium
- BrowserStack
Results
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The team sped up all software releases fourfold (from one month to one week) and significantly reduced testing time by implementing a customized test automation approach designed to eventually bring the full testing cycle down to just one day.
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The client’s testers and developers were trained through a1qa’s tailored practical course on test automation, which equipped them with the skills to become self-sufficient in designing, executing, and maintaining automated tests.
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a1qa’s experts ensured failsafe software operation and stable performance under consistently high load, preventing downtime, data loss, and transaction errors while maintaining a seamless and reliable user experience.
In numbers
7+
years of project duration
20+
QA engineers on board
4x
faster product delivery, and it continues to speed up