Quick QA Team Scaling for Supply Chain Software Company

Orderly, a supply chain technology provider, has been serving various enterprises for over a decade with their digital products that enhance supply chain visibility, generate long-term economic value, and promote sustainable practices. Their data-driven approach turns data into actionable insights delivered at the right time, enabling quick-service restaurants and grocery stores to achieve sustainability goals while minimizing waste.

Orderly offers two products:

• AI-powered forecasting, inventory, and ordering solutions specializing in food and beverage supply chains.
• A digital assistant that provides insights at the right time to QSRs and grocery store partners by predicting the future of the session to help them plan better during peak demand.

Orderly was in a period of hypergrowth and wanted to rapidly expand their QA department with test leaders – yet had very high standards and couldn’t find a partner that could meet their needs.

The client reached out to us looking for a QA engineer who would be able to organize the testing process in the team they would have joined. In other words, the team needed a QA specialist able to:

• set up the communication;
• analyze the product;
• prepare test documentation for it;
• run the necessary testing activities;
• and align software testing with the overall development process.

Involving an outsourced IT service provider would allow Orderly to scale the team quickly, getting an extra expert with the competencies their team required and able to start the work immediately on joining the project.

Orderly’s workflow was explained to the QA engineer. The Orderly’s team works in two-week sprints. They have daily meetings, backlog refinement sessions, planning, and retrospective meetings our QA specialist was to join.

To begin with, the quality assurance expert needed to prepare extensive testing documentation to describe the QA process and set the standards for future work on the project. Such documentation would help all team members stay on the same page and better understand the quality assurance part.

To set up the QA process:

1. The QA engineer started getting familiar with the product and its goals right after joining. Orderly aims to hit both profitability and sustainability goals and this was explained to the engineer.
2. The testing goals were discussed with the client’s team.
3. A close estimation of the software system was performed.
4. The necessary testing activities were defined.

Mobile testing was critical for the product. Thus, testing on tablets was the main focus. The QA specialist suggested performing the following:

• functional testing;
• exploratory testing;
• smoke testing;
• user interface testing;
• performance testing;
• accessibility testing.

The project is ongoing, and all the mentioned activities are repeated during each sprint. In addition, every sprint included regression testing, which is essential to run before releasing a new build to production.