Cutting Critical Bugs in Production to Zero for a Charity Platform

Challenge

When the client approached us, their mobile apps had already been live for several years. However, the quality assurance processes were fragmented, relying on a minimal internal team that struggled to keep up with growing testing needs. The lack of structured QA practices, combined with a distributed development environment, led to inefficiencies, limited test coverage, and an increased risk of critical issues reaching production. The client needed a flexible QA partner who could stabilize release testing, improve documentation, and integrate seamlessly with their global team without inflating operational costs.

Key challenges included:

• Unstructured release testing processes lacking repeatability and transparency.
• A minimal internal QA team stretched thin across support and testing tasks.
• Fragmented collaboration in a distributed team spread across multiple time zones.
• Outdated and incomplete test documentation hindering test coverage and automation.
• Insufficient visibility into potential bug scenarios, especially edge cases.
• Inconsistent user experience across a wide range of Android and iOS devices.
• Limited QA resources to support continuous feature additions and iterative updates.
• Manual testing bottlenecks preventing efficient scaling of QA efforts.
• No established workflows for testing critical payment error scenarios safely.

Solutions

We integrated a dedicated team of manual testers to take full responsibility for mobile app release testing, ensuring that every update was stable, well-documented, and thoroughly validated across iOS and Android devices. By embedding into the client’s distributed workflows, we established structured QA processes that replaced ad-hoc testing practices and ensured transparency across the entire release cycle.

Beyond day-to-day testing, our team proactively improved documentation, enhanced collaboration between teams, and proposed practical solutions for complex testing scenarios. Flexibility and ownership were central to our approach, allowing us to adapt to the client’s working hours and contribute to both process refinement and product quality.

Key activities on this project included:

• Setting up a stable, repeatable release testing workflow across mobile platforms.
• Rebuilding and expanding test documentation to support future automation.
• Ensuring thorough testing coverage for critical payment error scenarios.
• Coordinating with globally distributed teams to align QA efforts.
• Enabling near round-the-clock testing by taking advantage of time zone differences.
• Adapting work schedules for real-time collaboration during key release phases.
• Actively participating in process discussions and proposing QA improvements.
• Scaling testing efforts to support continuous feature updates without growing in-house QA capacity.

Results

Our QA team played a key role in stabilizing the client’s mobile app releases, maintaining a zero-critical-bug track record in production over two years. By establishing a structured testing workflow and enhancing collaboration with distributed development teams, we accelerated release validation cycles by 40% while increasing defect detection, especially in edge-case scenarios.

In parallel, we rebuilt test documentation, expanded device coverage, and ensured 100% validation of payment-related error flows. These efforts contributed to raising the app store ratings for both apps to 4.9, improved release predictability, and provided the client with a scalable QA process that supports ongoing product growth without expanding their in-house testing team.

0

critical bugs in production

40%

faster release cycle

2x

yearly increase in documentation

50%

reduction in QA-related delays