Overgear, an international platform for gamers, was able to implement effective tools and establish QA processes in the team.
It’s worth noting that Overgear’s turnover has increased 4 times in the last year alone. The company’s monthly turnover is more than $1.5 million.
In this article, we are ready to share our experience in optimizing QA processes.
Real Experience and Useful Insights
Overgear faced the challenge of implementing QA processes. The first thing that one shouldn’t forget is to conduct an audit. If there is no such expertise within the company, it is better to attract an external expert than to spend time on an independent study of the topic, as time in startups is really valuable.
The Overgear team invited an external QA expert to solve the problems in the context of the company’s scaling.
Experience exchange plays an important role for startups, and therefore we began to actively attend QA conferences and communicate with friends in order to find the ideal candidate. Thanks to attending the events on QA processes, we realized which specialist is most suitable for solving QA processes.
It was necessary to thoroughly study the metrics as soon as possible, and find an expert with relevant experience.
An external QA consultant, Overgear, was invited to solve problems with the study of metrics and search for an expert. He spoke about the importance of scaling and the positive changes that can occur in the work processes of the Overgear team.
It often happens that we allow the situation to take its course and hope for the best. But, as a rule, at such moment everything starts to go wrong. Therefore, it is better to build processes and budget for QA at the initial stage of planning a startup.
With the growth of the project, its infrastructure required changes.
How it was before:
Previously, the platform used inefficient tools that prevented extensive scaling. For example, Kanban (built on the Trello type) is not exactly a suitable tool for the scaling process.
Now, Overgear has implemented the Workflow system and added quality testing stages to it.
It is worth noting that one of the main tasks was solved – the collection of different metrics. Today, the ability to describe any product feature with a user story is extremely necessary. Since user story is, first of all, a business. And store-business is the value of this idea. A systematic approach helps to connect one with the other and clearly understand how one affects the other. As a result, there are no system errors and there is well-established functionality that users are happy with.
Another important planning task solved is ensuring high quality. It happens that the team launches an interesting feature, for example, a new payment system in the personal account, checks it, connects it, but nothing works. As a result, it turns out that there were no windows in the browser and the user could not make a purchase. Then they bring the new system to the entire product and remove the old one.
This results in no profit, loss of money, and bugs.
Conclusion:
The cost of an error is extremely high and requires thorough verification at all stages of any innovations.
A common situation that occurs in a startup is when, due to negative user reviews, the team hires an additional number of testers. Then the developers fix all the bugs found by these testers. Then there is a shortage of developers and the team hires even more developers. The snowball grows, but no one notices the root problem.
So, the checklists helped us to monitor compliance with all the processes at each stage and guaranteed a high-quality state of “definition of ready” and “definition of done”.
