Ongoing QA Support for a Service Marketplace

The client* is a multi-vendor e-commerce platform for B2B, B2C, and service marketplaces. The company develops modules that extend the functionality of a standard Magento CMS. These modules are unique add-ons meant to solve clients’ problems and make a platform suitable for nonstandard e-commerce business solutions – service-related offers.

* We recognize the importance of protecting our clients’ privacy and follow the policies to maintain their confidentiality and security. That is why the company name will not be disclosed.

There were several areas of work on the project where our QA team participated:

• testing of modules (new and existing but modified);
• setup of a marketplace from scratch;
• ongoing client support.

The main challenge lies in the particularities of the products. The client utilized the potential of Magento’s basic version and customized it to extend this potential. Basically, the task of the project team was to make Magento-based marketplaces suitable for selling services (item reservation & pickup, tutoring, household services, and others), which was not an option in the default version of the platform.

To ensure the correct work of a customized marketplace, the QA team carried out the following tasks:

• Test documentation writing.
• Functional and UI testing.
• Regression and smoke testing.

Testing the Customized Magento

In a way, the abovementioned points make a standard set of QA activities on an e-commerce project. However, given the specifics of the client’s solution, the QA engineers had a variety of tasks and configurations to work with.

For example, the platform for item reservation & pickup featured certain goods for each pickup location. The reservation itself was possible on a specific condition. In addition to a web marketplace for clients, there was a tablet application for managers. Users with admin access were to track statuses and manage orders in general.

One more example is a service platform for the elderly. In this case, we worked with a web platform that had different types of user access and an app for time tracking. The primer was meant for ad placement and was integrated with external CRMs to connect people requesting assistance and those providing it. The latter was meant to calculate the service price based on the type of assistance and time spent on it.

In both cases, just testing the given features wouldn’t be sufficient. The QA team needed to check integrations and synchronization first and then move to functionality. Thus, it was essential for QA engineers to study the system and its logic in detail to be able to understand all the connections and causal relationships. In a way, the team got to work with an entirely different Magento, rearranged in a bit unexpected way through the mentioned modules. As a rule, there were several rounds of testing in different environments before the company held a demo that involved their clients. Task prioritization and the QA team management were handled on our side.

Post-Release Client Support

Different solutions required a different number of modules to implement the idea and exploit its full potential. After a platform went live, its owner could order something extra or notice things that could be improved. Our QA team covered this post-release support: received a new request, tested a new build in a test environment, ran retesting and regression testing, and provided support after the new version went live.