Testing a Market Research Web Portal on Mobile Devices

Summary

An Ireland-based market research e-store runs a B2B web portal offering a large catalog of business intelligence and market research products across all industries. Originally built as an in-browser application and later adapted for mobile, the portal needed compatibility testing across mobile screens — without disrupting the live application's performance. INNERLUXES performed comprehensive testing and documented hundreds of bugs along with enhancement suggestions.

About the Customer

The Customer is an Ireland-based market research e-store. Its B2B web portal offers a large catalog of business intelligence and market research products (books, reports, webinars, trainings, newsletters, etc.) across all industries, including healthcare, retail, telecoms, banking, and education, and serves a broad base of corporate clients.

The Challenge

The Customer's web portal was developed quite a long time ago as an in-browser application and later adapted for mobile use following the increasing use of mobile devices. The Customer needed its e-store tested for compatibility with mobile screens, with the major requirement being to test a live application without disrupting its performance.

The Solution

The UI testers behaved as three types of user — logged-in, registered but not logged-in, and unregistered — testing functions such as registration, ordering, payment, and customer support inquiries. INNERLUXES performed UI testing, performance testing, load testing, user-isolation testing, and partial regression testing, checking the web portal functions, response time, usability, and ability to adapt to different mobiles and tablets.

Bugs were reported as issues in Jira on a daily basis; some were also immediately reported via instant messenger to be fixed promptly. For the convenience of the Customer's web development team, the defects were presented in JSON format. Due to the large quantity of bugs found, the Jira bug reports were structured within several categories to facilitate sorting and analysis.

To avoid interfering with the portal's operation, the testing engineers informed the Customer's web development team about all the test data entered on the portal so that it could be removed.

The Results

• The project estimation, checklists, and role-based test scenarios were developed and submitted for the Customer's approval.
• In total, 276 bugs were documented and reported.
• In addition to the requested bug reports related to mobile use, INNERLUXES detected bugs related to the desktop version (about 10% of the total) and suggested other website enhancements.
• The Customer was happy with the project outcome, with the cooperation extendable to test the new server architecture being deployed.

Technologies and Tools

Atlassian Jira; IE11, MS Edge, Chrome 55, Firefox, Safari 10; Windows 10, Android 4/5, OS X, iOS 4/5/6.