Manual and Automated QA for a Memorabilia Manufacturer

About client

Our client for this project is a renowned US-based manufacturer of memorabilia for school and college students. This is a company with a 40-year history that recently ventured into the eCommerce industry, so they requested the help of our QA department to perform comprehensive testing of the solution.

Challenge

By the time we joined this project, the client had been working with a team of manual QA engineers for some time. This resulted in over 10,000 test cases, accumulated over several years, being stored in Google Spreadsheets. So this became our first big task on the project — to move the documentation to TestRail for more effective prioritization and maintenance. Other objectives included:

• Validating all 10,000+ test cases to select the most relevant ones
• Analyzing the existing user scenarios
• Choose around 700 test cases for future automation
• Take over smoke and regression testing from the manual QA team

Solutions

From the very beginning, we focused on developing an effective collaboration between our team and the team of manual QA engineers who worked on the project. We regularly consult with them about test cases, testing conditions, and other aspects of QA. Here is what else we did to meet the project objectives:

• Moved 10,000+ test cases to a single format and storage location
• Imported the cases into TestRail, 500 cases at a time
• Created custom fields in TestRail to prepare detailed reports
• Together with the client, selected 700+ cases that needed to be automated
• Selected and prioritized different types of functionality to be tested in the upcoming sprints
• Perform daily smoke tests and regular regression tests
• Created detailed documentation and manuals using Confluence
• Helped the client adjust the workflow and introduce TestRail milestones for maximum efficiency
• Incorporated our work into the Scrum methodology and delivered the results in two-week sprints

Moreover, we used automated testing to help make the work of the manual QA team more efficient and perform more tests in the same amount of time. We chose Java to automate UI testing because we have successfully used it on similar projects multiple times before.

Our team on this project consisted of:

• One Manual QA
• One to two Automation QAs (on different stages of the project)
• QA Team Lead

Results

The work on this project is ongoing: our team joined the project over seven months ago and will continue working for at least another five months. We are continuing to deliver QA according to the plan and are currently discussing the possibility of performing manual and automated testing for the mobile version of the site. We are regularly receiving positive feedback from the client and are hoping for a long-lasting and fruitful relationship.