How implementing end-to-end manual and automated testing enabled an EdTech company to detect x40 more bugs at the early stage, speed up development cycles x5, cut down the cost of fixing errors and bugs x160, and bring down overall software maintenance costs by 16%.
Industry:
Education, Technology
Software Product Development
SaaS Development
Only 10% of startups can keep up with a current highly competitive market — and there’s a reason for that. Newcomers tend to adopt a ‘we can take care of it later’ mindset, often skimping on crucial areas of SDLC, such as requirements analysis, project documentation management, software testing, etc.
Startup succes & failure rate
Nevertheless, as your solution evolves, these shortcuts inevitably stab you in the back, sometimes putting at risk the overall success of your product.
That’s exactly where our client found themselves. An EdTech company providing a custom SaaS LMS with gamified courses had put software testing and project documentation on the back burner at the outset. Several years after the rollout, their e-learning library had ballooned to 40+ courses in 30+ languages, and their initial issues started to backfire. The client’s LMS became unstable, underperforming, plagued with errors and bugs, and expensive to maintain.
A closer look revealed even more issues:
Realizing that doing nothing would lead to losing customers, the client decided to turn things around by adopting software testing, documenting their projects, and enhancing the platform’s UX/UI.
The benefits they aimed to achieve included:
However, the client’s internal team couldn’t carry out these tasks on their own due to the lack of top-tier QA expertise and their already heavy workload. Therefore, they opted for IT staff augmentation services and partnered with *instinctools. We provided them with a senior-level QA engineers and frontend developers.
Before getting to user experience setbacks, we focused on adequate functional testing as a straight way to boost the LMS’s quality and accelerate development cycles.
For the client to fully cash in on the perks of automation, it was necessary to make sure that their manual processes run like clockwork.
Therefore, starting with the basics, our QA engineers mapped out a clear workflow for various types of manual functional testing, including unit, integration, interface, system, smoke, sanity, acceptance, and regression tests.
We’ve hit the ground running with the Cucumber testing framework as one of the leading options in the market, and during the first two months of cooperation, our QA specialists covered:
With manual testing paving the way, automation was the next natural step.
We blended the Cucumber framework with the WebDriverIO automation framework as this combo is not only powerful enough for large and technically sophisticated projects but also free of charge.
Thanks to our dedication during the manual testing phase, the transition to automation was hitch-free. Our automated functional testing now covers:
We blew past the client’s expectations — automated tests now handle 85% of the LMS functionality, 25% more than the initial 60% target.
Our developers teamed up with the client’s UX/UI designers to upgrade the platform’s interface and functionality. The revamped LMS now boasts intuitive notifications and progress bars for users and admins.
We continue working on test automation, implementing non-functional tests, and supporting the client’s in-house team in handling the rising scope of the platform’s interface makeover tasks.
The client’s VP of Engineering highlights cooperation with *instinctools:
One of the key benefits that I see for us from partnering with *instinctools is, for sure, the introductions of our automated QA. That really helped us to improve the quality of our software, specifically the newest systems that we are working on. Another really important benefit that I can’t highlight enough is actually the dedication and effort that was put into our existing learning management system by the engineers of *instinctools - to develop that system from the ground up with very limited time and still improve the system to address needs of the teams internally that we have and also to support customers with issues that they have.
Cutting corners on quality assurance is like setting yourself up for a sure failure. In 2024, businesses can’t afford bad software.
It’s never too late to bridge the gaps in your existing software testing with a comprehensive QA strategy and add powerful automation to your manual testing for maximum impact.
