Full-Stack Development and Quality Assurance for a Marketing Content Platform

Brandgility is a templating platform meant to help distributed teams design customized, brand-consistent marketing content. Sets of automated brand guidelines and integrations with creative tools allow users to create materials for print and digital distribution in minutes. Brandgility is globally-minded, suitable for businesses of all sizes, and used by some of the world’s biggest brands.

Brandgility’s platform is constantly evolving. It is regularly enhanced with new features and scales its user base. Therefore, the product team needs to scale accordingly. Brandgility contacted QA Madness while looking for an AQA Engineer to set up test automation. A few months later, they requested three Node.js specialists, two frontend developers, a Native Mobile Developer, and one more QA Engineer.

Brandgility takes the quality of its platform seriously, as customer satisfaction is one of the company’s top priorities. This is what ignited the cooperation with QA Madness, the expert team in software testing and quality assurance.

A need to find professionals quickly is one of the common challenges for product teams that enter the phase of rapid growth with their software becoming more complex. In this case, an independent QA provider helps shorten the hiring and onboarding process by providing the relevant expertise all at once instead of a company undergoing the complex in-house hiring procedure.

We discussed the requirements for the candidates with Brandgility’s CEO and assigned specialists with the relevant skills and experience to work on the product. Most of the processes were already set up when our first expert joined the project. The basic structure of the automated tests was also ready. We started expanding the existing framework, developing new features, and implementing minor process changes.

The company works in sprints (three to five weeks each). The software and QA engineers participate in daily online meetings, where the team discusses the progress of each member. Also, the product team has meetings where developers present and discuss new features they are to design. Engaging the QA experts this early helps better plan the implementation of these new features and prevent some issues at the stage of planning.

Quality Assurance

Brandgility requested Ambi Testing for their project, which means hiring QA specialists who can run both manual and automated testing. It works well for this product, as the platform is already mature but undergoes constant changes. Having professionals who specialize in both manual and automated QA helps accelerate the testing of the stable functionality while paying sufficient attention to the new, yet often unstable, features.

Currently, two QA engineers are working on the project. They receive a list of tasks at the beginning of each sprint. Manual tests cover the new features, usually designed during an ongoing sprint. While the developers code the new additions, the QA engineers automate the testing of the features from a previous release. Most of the regression and smoke tests are automated.

Software Development

The client faced difficulties with finding experts with suitable skillsets and expertise. The QA Madness team covered outstaffing, hiring six developers who now work on the project and are managed on the client’s side:

• Three Node.js Developers.
• Two Front-End Developers.
• One React Native Developer.

Software engineers are in charge of developing the new functionality and fixing the bugs that pop up in it. The list of features for implementation, their detailed descriptions, and timelines are discussed at the beginning of a sprint.

Developers also cover new code with tests, performing the so-called coverage tests. Using Jenkins, they roll out the branches on the team’s server, where QA engineers can test the new functionality. After the QA specialists confirm that it is stable, a build with new features is rolled out on the development server for the next round of testing.