VirtaMed

Challenge

To remain at the forefront of innovation, VirtaMed not only partners with reputable hospitals, medical societies, and medical device companies, but heavily invests in quality assurance.

VirtaMed turned to QAwerk to strengthen their on-site QA team with independent software testers. They looked for someone proficient in game testing because their medical training software is built on Unity, and the sessions themselves, to some extent, have game-like mechanics.

VirtaMed leverages Unity’s 3D digital twin technology and integrated haptic feedback to provide hyperrealistic surgical training.

VirtaMed also needed someone flexible enough to cope with the following challenges:

• Remote Testing. Our task was to test the simulation software remotely, using keyboard combinations and controllers instead of the physical instruments. We needed to get the hang of manipulating instruments to perform a smooth testing of the virtual simulator.
• Medical Terms. We were also expected to master a decent number of medical terms since this is crucial for understanding the training itself, reporting bugs, and day-to-day communication.
• Product Novelty. We’ve tested numerous gamified e-learning solutions, but nothing like VirtaMed’s surgical simulators. Therefore, the onboarding period required more effort in terms of diving into the industry specifics, understanding our client’s quality goals, and optimizing our testing workflows.

The project itself is quite large, so we also needed to devise a feasible testing strategy to have a clear picture of cases that passed QA, cases causing most bugs, and bug fixes in need of retesting, among other aspects.

Solution

Our QA team was engaged in testing software for LaparoS™ General Surgery and LaparoS™ Gynecology simulators. To achieve comprehensive, in-depth testing of the simulation software, we conducted the following:

• Functional Testing. We check if the simulator behaves as intended at every step of the procedure under test.
• Non-Functional Testing. Here we test haptics and instrument sensitivity. It’s done simultaneously with going through testing scenarios.
• UI Testing. Our QA engineers make sure the right information is displayed before and after performing simulations. We pay attention to warnings and errors popping up during the VR training.
• Regression Testing. We conduct full-fledged testing of the product before every release to see if the new build is stable and can be rolled out safely.
• Smoke Testing. If there are changes to a decoupled functionality or a minor bug fix, we quickly go through the main features to ensure nothing else has been affected by this change.
• Negative Testing. Occasionally, we deliberately deviate from happy paths and run negative test cases to detect hidden bugs, reduce the probability of crashes caused by improper user input, and increase the reliability and stability of the software.

To bring order into our testing process, we created test plans and test execution issues. The latter allowed us to instantly see what aspects have been checked and at what point issues usually arise.

VirtaMed also invited us to visit their facilities and exchange knowledge in person. We traveled to Zurich and tested their software on-site, this time using the actual VR simulators. The latter was beneficial for understanding the difference between testing simulators on-site and remotely.

VirtaMed’s simulators help improve medical education worldwide, so we also hope to contribute to localization testing in the near future.