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

Summary

A European IT company provided the public sector with custom solutions on its cloud platform, powering citizen self-service solutions and community portals — but it had developed the multi-user web application without testing engineers or test documentation, relying on developers for all testing. Concerned about product quality and post-release bug-fixing costs, the company engaged INNERLUXES to write test cases from available documentation and perform end-to-end testing.

About the Client

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

The Challenge

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

Having developed the multi-user web application without testing engineers (developers ran all testing) and without any testing documentation, the Client was concerned about software quality and the cost of fixing bugs after release. It turned to INNERLUXES to write test cases from the available project documentation and perform end-to-end testing. The project posed two main challenges:

• The Client had no formal requirements to draft test cases from.
• The dependencies and interconnections between application features were unclear.

The Solution

The project followed Agile methodology. Working closely with the Client, INNERLUXES's testing team addressed the challenges. To restore the requirements, the team performed detailed exploratory testing and communicated with the developers, transforming the requirements into test cases for:

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

The team traced dependencies between available application features and developed a comprehensive application map describing their interconnections. As the team tested, the Client kept improving the platform; when new features became available, the team tested them and ran regression testing to ensure system stability, adding new test cases to the suites. At the Client's request, the team also tested the application for compatibility with Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Internet Explorer 8/9/11 to ensure it catered to a large audience.

The Results

• The Client obtained documented requirements for a complex multi-user web application, test suites for functional and non-functional testing, and an application map reflecting feature dependencies and interconnections.
• INNERLUXES's team also ensured the application's compatibility with popular browsers.
• As a result, the platform was accepted and widely used by a large share of local government bodies nationwide.

Technologies and Tools

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