Testing of a Cloud-based Citizen Service Portal for a European IT Company

Customer

The Customer is a European IT company providing public sector with custom solutions based on their cloud platform. The platform powers cost-effective citizen self-service solutions and community portals.

Challenge

The platform targeted 2 types of users – local government and citizens. It offered the citizens a wide range of utility services based on authorization in the system. The local government could track citizen satisfaction via in-built CRM module and create e-forms for citizen service (litter collection, house repairs, etc.).

Developing the multi-user web application, the Customer didn’t employ testing engineers. It was developers who run all testing activities. The Customer also didn’t have any testing documentation. Consequently, they were concerned about the quality of the product software and the cost of fixing bugs after the release.

Seeking to write test cases on the basis of available project documentation and perform end-to-end testing, the Customer turned to ScienceSoft.

The project posed several challenges to ScienceSoft’s testing team:

• The Customer didn’t have any formal requirements that could be used to draft test cases
• The dependencies and interconnection between the application features were unclear

Solution

The project followed Agile methodology. Closely cooperating with the Customer, ScienceSoft’s testing team successfully addressed the challenges above.

To restore the requirements, the testing team performed detailed exploratory testing and communicated with the developers. The requirements were transformed into test cases for:

• functional testing
• non-functional testing (UI and UX testing)

Our testing team traced dependencies between available application features and developed a comprehensive application map describing interconnections between them.

As the testing team was performing testing, the Customer was working on improving the platform further. When new features were available, the team tested them and ran regression testing to ensure the stability of the system. New test cases were added to test suites.

Upon the Customer’s request, the testing team tested the application for compatibility with Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer 8/9/11 to assure that it catered for large audience.

Results

The Customer obtained documented requirements for a complex multi-user web application, test suites for functional and non-functional testing and application map reflecting dependencies and interconnections between the application features. ScienceSoft’s testing team also assured the application compatibility with the popular browsers. As a result, the platform was accepted and widely used by over 30% of local government bodies nationwide.

Technologies and Tools

Atlassian JIRA, Confluence, TestRail, Windows XP/7, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer 8/9/11