Genetics information company accelerates DevOps and improves product quality through QA services

Our challenges were to reduce defect leakage, meet our growing business needs with constant changes in requirements. The Trigent team learned our domain fast, met our automation needs with minimal training, and stretched QA to an 18x5 cycle. They worked cohesively with our DevOps teams. Our throughput increased by 45%, and production defect leakage reduced to less than 5%. We would gladly recommend Trigent for enterprise QA needs.

About the client

Our client is a leading medical genetics information company, with revenues of over $200m, with a mission to bring genetic information into routine medical practice to improve the quality of healthcare. They specialize in genetic diagnostics for hereditary disorders and provide affordable & accessible genetic testing to both patients & providers. The client offers three major categories of screenings - Diagnostics, Reproductive Health, and Proactive Health. The screenings include hereditary cancer, neurological & cardiovascular disorders, non-invasive prenatal screening (NIPS), pediatric developmental disorders, and many more.

Background

The client has an integrated portfolio of laboratory processes, software systems, and informatics capabilities to:

The software application portfolio consists of:

Business challenges

As the business grew, they added emphasis on customer experience (CX), which is simple despite the new features. And, this required the applications to work at optimum levels without interruptions during business hours. The individual applications underwent continuous improvements at a fast pace. As the volume of patients & data increased, CX could not be compromised, and the entire service had to be comprehensively tested for every change. Not only did the feature updates have to be tested regularly, but thorough regression testing was also required. As the organization acquired new companies, more services were added, and the client anticipated to operate a 24/7 lab very soon. The team had to ensure that the new capabilities were integrated and changes made to existing workflows while existing services continued to operate consistently.

To meet this goal, the client needed agile processes, improved test execution velocity, and high-quality releases.

This was achieved by institutionalizing DevOps, streamlined release processes, sprint planning, environment configuration, and tooling coupled with clarity of roles and responsibilities between developers and testers.

The approach included adopting the Software Development Engineer in Test(“SDET”) philosophy and how they think about software quality and testing - especially bringing proficiency at writing code and code for automated testing.

Trigent solution - QA services

An aggressive growth plan required rapid software delivery, and all teams to work in cohesion. Trigent identified the workflow of all the applications - covering the vital business process flows, user experience, technology integrations, and performance. We built a DevOps strategy to cover teams distributed across the US west coast, midwest, eastern Russia, and India. The teams were aligned to product lines, and a CI/CD pipeline was implemented. A significant portion of testing and deployment was automated.

To support the geographically distributed development teams, Trigent QA operated in multiple shifts covering about 18 hours a day. This reduced the feedback cycles and increased the sprint velocity.

A sprint cycle of two weeks in the beginning, and rapidly evolving towards a daily release model, ensuring that applications were upgraded continuously. As feature upgrades were developed, automated regression tests were executed using continuous integration tools, and the test results were posted directly to the test management tools.

Test environments were dynamically set up and torn down post-testing with AWS instances that allowed execution in a distributed manner. The testing covered complex rules and data validation across applications, also ensured that the applications supported multiple versions of operating systems and browsers. Omni-channel tests for mobile devices and web browser compatibility were run leveraging Saucelabs’ device farms.

Test and test automation became synonymous with exploratory testing complementing the increasing levels of automation to achieve high functional coverage within a short time. In a minimal time of around 2 hours, 600+ automated test scripts were executed.