L1-L3 Support and QA of Pet Wellness Web and Mobile Apps

About Our Client

The Client is a strategic advisory firm supporting startups throughout market entry, operational optimization, market expansion, M&A, and strategic exits. The company connects entrepreneurs with investors, mentors, developers, and other necessary resources and expertise.

The Advisor Was Looking for a QA and Support Partner for Its Customer

One the Client’s customers, a pet wellness company, was launching a subscription-based program promoting healthy pet nutrition. It offered its members free access to a dedicated mobile app, tailored nutrition plans, regular shipments of food supplements, and other benefits. To ensure a smooth project launch, the advisory firm partnered with ScienceSoft to facilitate the testing and support of the web and mobile applications for pet wellness.

Multi-Faceted IT Partnership to Empower Business Venture

At the core of the pet wellness product are the following applications:

• A mobile app (available on iOS and Android) that helps users choose proper nutrition for their pets.
• A web app with dedicated portals for registered pet owners, veterinary service providers, and admins.

As the apps were developed by a different outsourcing company, the Client engaged ScienceSoft for independent testing to verify the apps before the project launch. The process consisted of two stages:

• Functional testing — to ensure that all features of the web and mobile applications worked as expected.
• Performance testing — to evaluate the performance characteristics of the mobile app’s back end.

Pre-launch functional testing

The Client’s representatives and the outsourcing company’s developers held a demo session showcasing the core features of the apps to ScienceSoft’s team. They also provided documentation, including the database structure and high-level architecture description. Since the documentation lacked formal functional requirements, ScienceSoft’s test engineers used the exploratory approach during functional testing. While exploring the apps, our team simultaneously created testing checklists, verified the functionality, and submitted the found issues to the ticketing system. Finally, our team delivered a report outlining the tested functionality and the detected issues classified by their severity.

Based on the report, the Client decided to continue the development of the applications, with ScienceSoft providing development assistance and testing for new software versions.

Pre-launch mobile app performance testing

Based on the performance testing goals and the user behavior scenarios, ScienceSoft’s team developed performance test scripts and test data. Using Apache JMeter as the main testing tool, AWS EC2 instances as load generators, and New Relic and AWS CloudWatch for performance monitoring, our engineers executed baseline, capacity, and load tests to evaluate the back-end performance. The resulting report detailed test findings and recommendations, including setting up back-end monitoring and opting for non-burstable instances during the initial release phase.

Based on the report, the Client employed ScienceSoft to assist with the implementation of the recommendations.

24/7 L1-L2 help desk

Following the successful launch of the pet wellness apps, ScienceSoft began providing 24/7 L1-L2 app support with 30-minute FRT (first response time). Our agents handled users’ technical problems with mobile and web apps, including:

• App installation issues.
• Login issues.
• Password resets.
• User-reported performance issues like app and website slowdowns and crashes.

Requests related to subscriptions, billing, shipping, and company information were escalated to the internal customer support team of the pet wellness company.

L3 support

Satisfied with ScienceSoft’s responsiveness and service quality, the Client requested L3 application and infrastructure support to help the app development team address the remaining functional and performance issues. ScienceSoft’s engineers:

• Performed a code audit and delivered a report with improvement recommendations.
• Provided development assistance and bug fixing in cooperation with the outsourced development team.
• Reviewed the mobile app infrastructure and provided improvement recommendations.
• Implemented a CI/CD pipeline, which was recommended by ScienceSoft’s DevOps engineer.
• Handled infrastructure requests, such as deploying a new application environment using the optimal EC2 instance type.

Key Outcomes for the Client

• The Client strengthened its reputation as a dependable advisor by driving its end customer’s business efficiency through strategic outsourcing of software testing and support functions.
• The end customer, a pet wellness company, enjoyed a smooth application launch thanks to the targeted improvements to the pet wellness apps’ code, infrastructure, delivery pipeline, and user experience as recommended by ScienceSoft.
• The Client freed up its end customer’s support team by outsourcing 24/7 user help desk to ScienceSoft, which ensured rapid response times (FRT under 30 minutes).