QA Strategy and 3-Year Agile Testing of Legacy Apps Under Modernization

About the Customer

The Customer is one of the leading nonprofit organizations dedicated to the mental health of children and adolescents in the United States.

Need for Long-Term Agile Testing of Legacy Apps Under Modernization

The Customer was modernizing two large-scale legacy solutions: a web app and a cross-platform mobile app for monitoring, analyzing, and improving the mental well-being of children and teenagers. The company sought a QA partner that would design a comprehensive QA process and consistently run all the required tests during the software modernization and evolution cycles over several years.

Comprehensive Testing of Mental Health and Therapy Apps for Children

ScienceSoft provided a team of two test automation engineers and five manual testers. The QA team started by creating a high-level test strategy and plan that emphasized flexibility, continuous integration, and early bug detection. The QA team planned checklists and test cases iteratively, aligning them with sprints planned by the Customer’s PMs.

Throughout the three-year collaboration, ScienceSoft established 1,800+ check points for the mobile user interface, 4,400+ check points for the admin panel, and 500+ check points for the web user interface, ensuring thorough quality assurance across all software components.

During the test execution stage, our team:

• Conducted manual functional testing at the UI level.
• Conducted manual and automated compatibility testing across different browsers, platforms, and devices.
• Developed a suite of automated end-to-end UI smoke tests, achieving 56% coverage of the system's functionality. These tests could be executed in 7 minutes compared to the 12 hours required for manual testing.
• Created automated API tests and integrated them into the CI/CD pipelines to optimize the testing time and costs for release and regression testing. This way, ScienceSoft achieved API test coverage of 99%.
• Ran database migration tests. As the project required migrating from a MongoDB to a PostgreSQL database, our testing team conducted manual data migration testing to guarantee accurate data transfer without losing its integrity or consistency.

Throughout the project, ScienceSoft's QA engineers adhered to the ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119-3:2021 standards for software testing documentation.

The QA team presented the testing results during the sprint reviews after each sprint, demonstrating the defects found and discussing potential fixes. The feedback from the testing team was quickly integrated into the subsequent development iterations.

50% Faster Releases with Zero Quality Trade-Offs

Rigorous testing performed by ScienceSoft in an Agile manner helped the Customer run a smooth legacy app modernization project for three years. We performed functional and compatibility testing at the UI level, API testing, and database migration testing. We automated 56% of end-to-end UI smoke tests and reached 99% API test coverage. With the test automation introduced by ScienceSoft, the Customer achieved 50% faster releases without sacrificing software quality.

Technologies and Tools

Mocha, Chai, Postman, Axios, Jenkins CI, Git, Atlassian Jira, Confluence