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High end testing of operational data management system for a leading bioinformatics company

Q3's global sourcing model gives the maximum benefit to customers in terms of cost savings, improved quality, access to highly talented professionals, flexibility of operations and reduced time to market.

Company Profile

Client is a leading supplier of discovery, collaboration, and knowledge enterprise solutions, desktop software, scientific databases and consulting services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and chemical industries.

The Company provides: Enterprise solutions, desktop software, scientific databases, and professional services for biotechnology, drug discovery and chemical research, including software, databases, and web sites which enable customers to create, analyze and communicate chemical, biological, and scientific information more effectively.

Client products are used primarily in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and chemical industries, as well as in higher education and in academic and government research.

Business Situation

The project taken by client was basically an enhancement called ODMS (Operational Data Management system) over the base product which was tested earlier by Q3 team.

• The Operational Data Management System (ODMS) supports the operational management of experimental results for in vivo and low-throughput/flexibleformat in vitro experiments.
  
• The base product was integrated with other application for a fully centralized access of the Bio-Informatics package. The main enhancements done with the project were Calculations and Curve, built in graphing engine, Built-in data validity management and QC, Numerous Visualization Options.

As this project was module based and then integrated with the base product so the challenge was to have a stable application which required domain expertise, testing application integration and verifying Regression.

This enhancement was not just running test plan and doing Ad-hoc testing but it needed a high end research oriented logic. Product was customized highly scientific and it needed a regression testing covering scientific research logic.

Solution

Entire solution was provided by the Q3 team apart from the software development work. It not only included testing of the application but exploring the new features with logic by quality assurance, developing the Test Plan by quality assurance after understanding the workflow of the enhancement modules, Execution of the Test Plans.

• Weekly meeting with Client and Q3 Team discussing the strategies to be followed for new releases incorporating the previous changes and Integration done by the software development team.
• With every release bugs entered, fixed by developers and then retested by the Q3 team and running of test plans with every build made the project quality unquestioned by client side.
• People are so expert that they were asked to do the installation of new builds on Remote servers to save time and have them on.
• Integration testing, Regression testing were carried thinking out of box and going beyond the limits.
• The knowledge of the quality team is so vast that on released bugs are also tested by this team.
• Every week a build was provided and running of test plans, entering bugs and ad-hoc testing was one major job out after any new build.
• As it was dealing primarily with the enhancement modules so lot of effort was put for regression testing. Areas of regressing were defined.
• At the end recording of all the test scripts and the workflow is provided to the client for training purpose.
• Documentation people also involved accomplishing the complete software testing

Benefits

• Entire software testing was done by Q3 Team so the client was benefited by manpower with less cost and above all supporting 24*7 work environment.
• Testing was done in user’s view so the bugs entered were realistic as interaction with developer happened rarely.
• Quality work was shown by many showstopper bugs which were taken care of on time.
• Q3 Team was honored again for testing the customized product for different clients.
• Exceeded expectation by meeting high time frame with the work.
• Talent and quality was appreciated by Client which was shown by involving Q3 in Sales meeting after the release of the product.