Testing a Market Research Web Portal on Mobile Devices
Customer
The Customer is the world’s leading market research e-store headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. Its B2B web portal which is visited by more than 500,000 business leaders per month offers over 1.5 million business intelligence and market research products (books, reports, webinars, trainings, newsletters, etc.) in all industries, including healthcare, retail, telecoms, banking and education. The list of organizations buying the Customer’s researches includes over 400 corporations of the Fortune 500.
Challenge
The Customer’s web portal was developed quite a long time ago as an in-browser application; then, following the increasing use of mobile devices, it was adapted for mobile use, too. So the Customer needed to have its e-store tested for compatibility with mobile screens. The major requirement was to test a live application without disrupting its performance.
Solution
The UI testers behaved as users of three types (logged-in, registered but not logged-in and unregistered ones), testing such functions as registration, ordering, payment and Customer support inquiries. UI testing, performance testing, load testing, user isolation testing and (partly) regression testing were performed. So ScienceSoft’s specialists checked the web portal functions, the response time, usability, the ability to adapt to different mobiles and tablets.
The bugs were reported as issues in JIRA on a daily basis; some of them were also immediately reported via an instant messenger to be fixed promptly. For the convenience of the Customer’s web development team, the defects were presented in the JSON format. Due to a large quantity of the bugs found, JIRA bug reports were structured within several categories to facilitate their sorting and analysis.
In order not to interfere with the portal’s operation, the testing engineers informed the Customer’s web development team about all the testing data entered on the portal so that it could be removed.
Results
The project estimation, checklists and role-based test scenarios were developed and submitted for the Customer’s approval. In total, 276 bugs were documented and reported. In addition to requested bug reports related to mobile use, ScienceSoft’s testing team detected bugs related to the desktop version (about 10% of the total amount), as well as suggested other website enhancements.
The Customer is happy with the project outcome, and the cooperation can be extended to test the new server architecture, which is currently being deployed.
Technologies and Tools
Atlassian JIRA, IE11, MS Edge, Chrome 55, FF, Safari 10, Windows 10, Android 4/5, OS X, iOS 4/5/6.
