Existing QA Processes Audit to Prevent Frequent Issues in Production
A big enterprise application for financial market overview with many years of development history and numerous releases requested a QA processes audit. They had thousands of corporate users in production and each serious bug caused significant financial expenses. There were several cross-located development teams working on the product.
Industry:
FinTech
Services:
QA as a Service
Location:
US
Challenge
The product teams with QA engineers didn’t follow a single process, didn’t use a single set of tools, and were distributed across different locations. They didn’t have any QA metrics like defect containment, decline rate, or test coverage. The requirements lacked a robust structure and it was not easy to build a clear picture of the process to find any bottlenecks.
Solution
First, our QA service team started following all development processes and participating in all project meetings of all teams to be able to get a picture of the development lifecycle.
We investigated the release process between development, staging, UAT and production environments, CI/CD pipelines and quality gates, the testing pyramid, the test-cases management process (creation, review, updating, traceability, etc.), approach to the bug-report style conventions and synchronization of testing activities between the teams. Then, we calculated primary metrics that highlighted the QA quality. The whole analysis process affected more than 100 aspects of the development and testing process.
The final report with improvements contained not only suggestions for improvements of the QA-related processes but it affected the whole development process in general: from communication and alignment on development phases, strategies and approaches between distributed teams to following the single style of test cases, bug reports, testing reports and high-level testing documents between the teams.
About the team
We dedicated the QA service team to auditing the QA processes and documentation.
Impact
The QA team helped to put most suggested improvements into practice. The number of major defects in production went down to 0, the defect containment rate to < 5%, and the pre-production testing stage speeded up since we have built a proper testing pyramid.
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