Arctype

Challenge

As a successfully growing startup, Arctype felt the need to strengthen their development team with experienced QA engineers. They needed someone to follow the best practices and draw on their expertise to create new test cases. This way, developers won’t waste their time on software testing and instead will channel their energy toward feature development and bug fixing.

Arctype turned to QAwerk to help them ensure multiple monthly releases go smoothly and with the needed speed. We were expected to run test cases the same day the release was put out. Thanks to the difference in our time zones and overnight testing, it was possible that when Arctype developers log off, it’s daytime here in Ukraine and our QA engineers begin testing. The next day, Arctype developers have all bugs already logged in Jira to start bug fixing first thing in the morning.

Another milestone is to retain 10-20% consumers who churn because of bugs by significantly increasing the software quality and preventing critical issues from appearing in prod.

Solution

Our QAwerk team is primarily engaged in testing the Arctype desktop app for macOS. At the same time, if we see that the new version works incorrectly, we also test the web client and go through the most critical test cases on Windows.

Here are the types of testing we regularly perform to achieve the desired quality:

• Functional Testing – the groundwork we lay to ensure users encounter no obstacles with the app’s functionality.
• Integration Testing – essential to guarantee the SQL client has no integration issues with databases, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Yugabyte, and PlanetScale.
• Regression Testing – a must-have for startups like Arctype that continuously work on releasing new features. We do regression consistently to check if updates affect the existing functionality.
• Automation Testing – we combine manual testing with QA automated testing to speed up the releases. We’ve automated registration and login test cases and are looking into other areas that have automation potential.
• Installation Testing – a basic type of testing, yet also important. We ensure Arctype users can download, install, and update the app without technical errors.
• Smoke Testing – before going through an extensive list of test cases, we need to ensure the build is stable to avoid wasting time. We quickly check critical features to see if there are any showstoppers and if we can proceed.

We started with 50 test cases Arctype suggested and expanded them to over 200. Those include sad and happy paths as well as test cases with different database types and details. We test new builds weekly and add test cases together as we go.

Our QA engineers are deeply involved in creating new test cases and making them as detailed as possible. The amount of time needed for a test run of a new build only takes 8-9 hours, considering the complexity and variety of features.