AltexSoft Builds up a Scalable QA Automation Framework to St

Business domain: Finance
Services: Engineering Services
Technology: Microsoft.NET

Background

M7 Real Estate Ltd. is a leading European real estate asset management company, operating across 11 countries. The company has built a number of internal software tools to optimize the business processes and specific management tasks.

One such software solution, COYOTE Digital, is an internal property database and a commercial real estate data management platform. Used by the company’s investors, advisors, and real estate organizations, it aggregates the info on over 9,800 property assets into a comprehensive knowledge base. The COYOTE Digital tool tracks the property at any stage, providing exhaustive documentation on demand.

Challenges

As the company’s property database grew, more features were added to the software solution by the client’s in-house development team. Eventually, this resulted in some major performance issues.

AltexSoft was contracted to augment the client’s development team with quality assurance engineers and accomplish the following tasks:

Conduct a complete performance analysis

Set up an established quality assurance process

Conduct the quality control throughout the future releases.

Value Delivered

Working on the project, AltexSoft team achieved the following results:

Conducting a thorough performance assessment and pinpointing of its bottlenecks

In order to define and solve performance issues, our engineers have thoroughly studied the existing product. They conducted comprehensive system architecture review and numerous load tests. This helped us pinpoint specific problems and target these bottlenecks without the need to completely re-engineer the software solution. As a result, we have provided the results of the load testing along with practical architecture improvement recommendations. This pilot project gave the client a better understanding of the possible trouble spots within the product and served as a solid foundation for the further development collaboration.

Introducing a complete testing automation framework

Seeing the potential added value of the software quality improvements, based on the conducted research, the client extended our cooperation in order to set up an efficient Quality Assurance Automation process. Our QA engineers have joined the client’s team on a full-time basis and built a full-fledged testing automation framework from scratch. As a result, 300+ autotest scenarios were developed to cover over 50 pages of the application, which makes about 90% of the functionality and UI. Thanks to the process automation, the time required to test the software was reduced by a factor of 10. This resulted in substantial cost savings in the long run and significantly contributed to the overall quality of the software.

Ensuring stability and quality of every new feature

Having a sustainable QA automation framework in place, we extend the test coverage as new features are implemented. Working in close cooperation with the client’s team, our QA engineers manually test every new element and feature, describe the test cases and add them to the existing framework to run automatically. New features and updates are thoroughly tested on a development server and staging server before each release. The testing results are documented in a form of a visual report with text logs, screenshots and videos. As the development team gets instant notifications about any error, they can immediately see and fix them with no delays. This makes the product releases predictable, while providing faster time to market for each new update.

Approach and Technical Info

As the project started with the technology consulting and performance research, there was only one software engineer assigned at this stage. Yet, 3 QA engineers and a project manager were involved in the QA automation process. The project is ongoing with the above-described work having the total duration of 9 months with the scope equaling to 27 man-months.

The technology stack and toolset included: Selenium WebDriver, C#, Microsoft.NET, REST API, BrowserStack.

Services provided within the project framework: Engineering Services.

Microsoft.NET