Brief about Client and their Product
The client is based out of Philadelphia, USA.
The client’s product provides proactive IT operations software to address the challenges associated with managing hybrid IT infrastructure.
These infrastructures include physical, virtual, or cloud-based IT, and the product provided gives the control to monitor, analyze, troubleshoot, and report performance issues before end users are impacted.
The product is well established and has thrived while adding over 400 clients in this dynamic marketplace with over 25000 licenses.
Features offered:
– Monitor and Analyse Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) provided by major market players like Citrix and VMware.
– Troubleshoot issues with physical servers in an organization.
– Provide analysis related to performance issues for any infrastructure, which may be physical, virtual, or cloud-based IT.
– Monitor and resolve Applications, SMTP server-based issues for a better end-user experience.
Kind of Engagement
AFour’s engagement started with the client in May 2018 as a QA partner for this project.
After successfully kick-starting QA, we also provided development services for the client’s product.
The development practice was to fine-tune the product’s UI performance by implementing the pagination feature.
In the later stages, we also provided IT support, handling support tickets for setup and Infrastructure issues.
Key Highlights and Achievements
Being the only QA team, we own end to end QA for this project.
We have identified the testing scope and prepared test plan and strategy accordingly for this project.
Since the product is already well established in the market, the test plan needs to be more robust and client-centric pertaining to real-world scenarios.
QA uncovered many high severity defects, which got fixed.
Alongside this, we have also had a brief engagement for a Developer who helped with the performance-related issues in the product, and changes were implemented accordingly.
We recently also had IT support engagement (SysOps) and helped with the successful transition of the IT remote infrastructure management system.
Team Composition
There is one lead test engineer along with a software test engineer who looks after QA efforts.
We also have a developer who looks after the Performance issues in the product and suggests and implements changes for the same.
For the IT support, we have a senior system administrator to look after various IT tickets and Infrastructure related issues, which included Database Architecture as one of the tasks.
Project Delivery Process and Communication
Communication and updates happen over weekly calls or through emails.
We have a scheduled weekly call where we share status on QA activities and understand priorities for the coming week.
Tools and Technologies
For QA tasks, we did an extensive study on how VDIs work and how they are deployed in a production environment so to replicate the exact behavior but at a smaller scale.
We have built our own lab at AfourTech, comprising of Virtual servers with Windows OS.
Initially, we used Testlink for test case management but eventually switch to Zephyr.
For defects and the Agile board (Sprint summary), we are using JIRA.
For development, we are using React and AngularJs.
