Performing QA for a cloud-based platform built to help clinical research sites, sponsors, and CROs improve the efficiency, security, and transparency of their workflows and document management.
Challenge
Spotless software quality is integral for all types of software projects and all industries, but there are few industries where it’s as critical as in healthcare. With so much riding on the performance, speed, availability, and accuracy of medical software, the importance of timely testing is not really up for debate. This is the notion we carry through all of our healthcare-related projects and that we also turned out to share with our client for this project.
At the time of the request, the client had three development teams responsible for three different functional sections. The software development process was very intense, and the project didn’t have enough testing capacity in-house to support such active development. To improve productivity on the project and expand their testing capabilities, the client requested our company to provide experienced QA engineers who would augment their team.
The key challenge of the project was the sheer amount of components that needed to be tested with maximum precision for a particularly demanding industry and establishing smooth communication between all the participants working on the project.
Solution
The subject of our testing efforts is a HIPAA-compliance-certified solution, so it was necessary and appropriate for engineers working on the project to understand and comply with HIPAA regulations before doing the actual testing. Therefore, we made sure to provide the client with QA engineers who possess deep domain knowledge and experience in Healthcare software development and testing.
We provided the project with two part-time QA engineers and one full-time dedicated QA engineer. The project was using the Scrum framework for project management.
Despite the fact that we operated in different time zones, together with the client’s in-house QA Team Lead, our QA engineers established transparent, efficient communication with the development teams and quickly got in sync with the workflows on the project.
Automated software testing in healthcare helps ensure not only the spotless performance of the application and its components under any conditions, but also the fact that the product conforms to strict industry standards and regulatory requirements. This is why the decision to automate parts of the project was a completely natural one.
In close collaboration with the in-house project team, our QA engineers:
- established efficient bug tracking and reporting workflows
- created and executed test cases and performed all the necessary QA activities on a daily basis
- created new and updated the existing documentation, including test scenarios, traceability matrices, and bug reports
- automated regression testing using the Selenium IDE
- reorganized the QA process to prepare the project for further test automation
- provided recommendations on documentation and workflow optimization
Technologies
Types of testing our QA engineers carried out:
- Functional testing
- UI/UX testing
- Regression testing
- Smoke testing
- Sanity testing
- Exploratory testing
- Confirmation testing
- Cross-browser testing (Chrome, Internet Explorer 11)
Result
Overall, the work on the project continued for two years. Through a hybrid approach of Dedicated Team combined with T&M, we provided the client with maximum flexibility in resource management, where they could scale their QA team up and down on demand, depending on the intensity of their software development process. This approach enabled the client to optimize the workload more effectively and maintain productivity on the project at a high level.
