Quickly roll out or update a reliable, scalable eCommerce site with on- or off-site Software Quality Assurance (SQA) engineers and technicians from QualityLogic. Our teams are experts in all aspects of eCommerce QA support for high-intensity eCommerce sites.
Software Quality Under Pressure
Think there just isn’t enough time or money to do a proper job of SQA? Companies that fall into that trap end up with engineers fixing code problems somewhere down the road—often when a defect becomes a critical failure.
eCommerce success often depends on getting new marketing strategies on the site within a day or two. The site pages and scripts have to be ‘right the first time’ in a hurry-up culture that makes this just about impossible.
To get it right, the process requires:
- Infrastructure/architecture documentation
- Agile methodology implementation
- Development of effective sanity checks
- Acceptance test automation
- Communication of defects/corrections
- Code release management
We can help you implement these tools under high pressure, short deadline conditions. With QualityLogic’s eCommerce QA Support, software quality can become your reality!
eCommerce Architecture/Infrastructure
eCommerce sites often grow quickly. In the end, the memories of a few key software engineers may be all that hold the original architectural vision. This ‘Tribal Knowledge’ creates problems for rapidly-growing companies. Key engineers get distracted by trivial ‘where’s this’ and ‘how do I do that’ questions. Proactive system maintenance is shortchanged.
QualityLogic can provide technical resources, free of other commitments, to map out and document critical business functions and the eCommerce system as it exists. This map can introduce your new technical staff to your system and make them productive in a short period of time. It is a valuable resource for implementing new functionality and catching structural problems before they become critical system failures.
This is the basis from which we work with your engineering team to streamline the code development process and apply a set of process metrics to reduce defects.
Sanity Checks
Unintentional breakage caused by feature upgrades and attempted bug fixes is a big problem in maintaining a live system’s code base. The cure for this is to test each aspect of the system to verify that it retains its basic functionality.
Ideal sanity checks test as much as possible, as quickly as possible. In an eCommerce environment, you’ve got to be able to check the entire system in two to four hours. The checks focus on business processes, so each test verifies the basic operation of one critical site function. QA runs the sanity check on a test site that mirrors the live site and is used solely to verify code modifications.
An expansion of this is the surveillance test system, which exercises the live site. This test approaches the site from your user’s perspective, verifying paths from introductory pages to shopping carts through purchase and delivery of products. These tests catch live site problems before they cost your company sales and customers.
If you use your engineering staff to create tests, the blind spots that caused defects can result in those defects being missed in the tests, as well. QualityLogic’s eCommerce QA support services design sanity checks and surveillance systems from a fresh perspective.
Defect Reporting
When the engineers who develop the code also test it, bugs fall through the cracks. The cure is to create a results-oriented view into code quality.
The lynchpin of SQA is defect reporting. Ideally, your team would fix all defects before a code module ever saw a customer. In reality, you have to make trade-offs between costs, schedules, and market priorities. You base these compromises on the best information available. You need a concise, complete defect report that acts as a roadmap to improve your development process so old coding mistakes aren’t repeated.
QualityLogic has a great deal of experience implementing and working with defect reporting systems. We can set up a new defect reporting system or integrate with your existing system. We make considered system design and implementation decisions for the best fit to your business and code development models.
Code Release Management
A code development group in a growing eCommerce company must manage increasingly complex site source code. QualityLogic can help you make your code management system an institutional aspect of development. We can set up a QA mirror system to thoroughly and safely test code modifications prior to deployment. And we can set up code release cycles that allow for the timely development of new code, testing in this safe environment, and a sanity check before release.
To learn more about what QualityLogic’s eCommerce QA support can do for you, fill out the form below or contact us.
