Manual and Automated Testing of a Scientific R&D Platform with Millions of Users

Summary

A provider of research and development software for biology and chemistry — used by millions of scientists and thousands of enterprises — needed to keep validating its platform as it grew, in step with two-week Scrum releases. INNERLUXES provided a dedicated QA team that designed a comprehensive testing process and ran manual and automated functional, performance, and security testing for four years, helping the platform hold its fortnightly release schedule.

About the Client

The Client is a provider of software for advanced research and development in biology and chemistry. Its software is used by millions of scientists and thousands of enterprises around the world.

Comprehensive Testing Aligned With Two-Week Scrum Cycles

As its R&D platform grew and evolved over the years, the Client needed help validating its functionality, integrations, performance, and security. It sought a QA partner to design a comprehensive QA process and perform the testing in step with its two-week Scrum development cycles.

Manual and Automated Functional, Performance, and Security Testing

INNERLUXES assigned nine manual test engineers and two test automation engineers to verify the quality of the Client's R&D platform. The team designed a comprehensive test strategy and plan and integrated testing seamlessly into the Client's Scrum framework — defining the feasible degree of test automation, creating 860+ test cases and 1,200+ reusable, easy-to-maintain test scripts, and incorporating the scripts into the CI/CD pipeline. Over the four-year engagement, INNERLUXES tested the platform in parallel with its evolution:

• Functional testing across unit, system, integration, API, and database levels.
• Performance and load testing to ensure resilience under high-demand scenarios.
• Manual security assessments to find and mitigate vulnerabilities, following OWASP best practices.

Throughout, the team recorded every finding and data point in line with the ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119-3:2021 guidelines.

Four Years of QA Keeping a Two-Week Release Schedule

With an effective test automation environment complemented by manual testing, the Client maintained its R&D platform's two-week release schedule and delivered features and updates efficiently for four years.

Technologies and Tools

Selenium WebDriver, Robot Framework, Apache JMeter, Postman, Burp Suite, Apache Maven, Jenkins, Oracle SQL Developer, Bitbucket.