E-Commerce (recruitment services) Project

Client

Ajilon Consulting develops customized IT solutions for Fortune 1000, mid-tier, government and private organizations in every industry, including finance, healthcare, insurance, telecommunications, manufacturing, utilities and transportation.

Customer

The customer is a big UK consulting company.

System’s Overview

The main idea of the project was to build the system that would include exhaustive functionality to provide effective on-line recruitment services which would be supposed to be the most popular on the UK territory. The system was divided into three independent parts: the first was aimed to support jobseekers involved in IT sphere, the second part was developed for the office and secretarial recruitment, and the third one was the custom CMS module. Each part of the recruiting system had a personal brand and unique website design. The set of functions and options was specific for each site.

Key functions:

• Candidate Registration;
• Client Registration;
• Vacancy Registration;
• Vacancy Posting;
• Candidate Job Applications;
• Basic MIS reporting.

Web Accessibility Initiatives (WAI) were taken into consideration when building the site to ensure the sites are user friendly to all customers, irrelevant to their connection method, i.e. PC, phone etc.

The system supports all commonly used browsers including PC and Mac browsers namely all versions of IE 5.0 (sp1) and above, Opera 7.0 and above, Fire Fox and Safari. Search Engine Optimization was taken into account while developing the system/pages to ensure that the Ajilon Brands are shown in the best light when outside people perform search on key searching sites such as Google and Yahoo.

Project Organization

Three teams worked in close interaction during the product construction. Qulix QA was engaged as software testing services provider for the project.

General project organization is displayed in the following diagram:

Testing Goals

• To track the timely delivery of new features and its implementation correctness;
• Perform testing of integrated intermediate builds and reporting on the current quality for timely resolving detected problems;
• To determine the problems connected with discrepancies between the functional requirements and application functionality;
• To track defects appearance and current status;
• To give pooled estimation of the software product quality;
• To reduce and avoid the risks of project that could take place during application development.

Test Team’s Main Tasks

• Test planning;
• Comprehensive test cases design;
• Manual functional testing according to the designed test cases and coming change requests;
• Functional test automation with test coverage tends to 100%;
• Reporting on the every builds quality, development progress and system’s stability.

Problem Definition

At the beginning of the project the level of functional specification detailing left much to be desired. Test team had to work in close interaction with the customer’s business analyst, QA manager and lead developer to come to an agreement regarding a correct system’s behavior, testing schedule and actual tasks. There were a lot of change requests during the project implementation; it caused regular DB updates and changes in application’s architecture. Besides, during the first half of a year the customer changed his view on the system’s GUI design several times. All this peculiarities entailed significant planning, development and testing workload increasing.

Process overview:

• The project went using the Time & Material scheme;
• Team size: Qulix QA involved 5 quality control engineers: two functional test engineers and three test automation engineers. To make the process effective we used the scheme of gradual resource engagement and dismissing;
• To make knowledge sharing process easier we used all available communication facilities such as: e-mail, instant messenger (Skype), phone calls;
• At the project initiation phase we prepared:
  • Test plan which displayed all activities supposed to take place during the project going, testing goals, human and hardware resources, testing strategy and all organizational questions;
  • Test scenarios with test coverage tended to 100%;

Both documents were agreed with client’s QA manager.

• The testing process was based on the regular builds integration and testing;

For each build we had to perform the following test types:

•  
  • Minimal acceptance test (MAT) – to ensure that the build is stable and ready for further testing;
  • Fixed bugs validation;
  • New features comprehensive testing;
  • Regular regression testing of all previously developed functions to be sure that new features implementation did not course bugs appearance;
  • Usability and GUI testing.
• In parallel with functional testing the automation team performed test automation for already implemented functions. Later we run test scripts for each build before the manual testing to perform MAT and get the general notion about the quality of already automated functions;
• Finally after the build’s test completing test results were sent to the project manager;
• Once a week on Fridays we sent a letter displaying tasks completed during the passed week, planned tasks for the next week, general problems and etc.