Functional Web and Mobile App Testing for Singularity University

The Client

Singularity University (SU) is a think tank that provides educational programs, innovative partnerships and a startup accelerator to help individuals, businesses, institutions, investors, NGOs and governments understand cutting-edge technologies and how to utilize them to positively impact billions of people.

Started in 2008 by the founders of Google and headquartered on the NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley, SU began as a ten-week interdisciplinary program for top students and entrepreneurial leaders around the world.

The university’s opening day was attended by some of the top thinkers from around the world including Tesla founder, Elon Musk, former Apollo 11 NASA astronaut, Buzz Aldrin, to Craig Venter, one of the first scientists to sequence the human genome.

More than a decade later, SU has created further initiatives with influential thinkers to further educate, inspire, and empower a diverse global community of over 200,000 people from 85 countries.

The Need

In 2017, Singularity University was in the midst of a digital transformation in which it shifted one of its focuses from in-person interactions to online events and community building for its programs.

The SU product team partnered with a Brazilian software development company to create its online member portal in the form of web and mobile apps that allow its users to create a profile, share their interests, message others, find recommended SU programs, chapters, and events nearby.

An ambitious undertaking—transitioning to a new interface and launching mobile applications, the SU team needed to have its apps thoroughly tested to ensure proper functionality for the best possible user experience and reduce risk.

Our Solution

A senior Abstracta tester joined the Singularity development team full-time to manage and carry out all testing activities for its web and mobile applications.

At the outset, the tester explored the application and communicated with as many team members as she could, including the Product Manager, in order to obtain the necessary information to understand the most important use cases while helping to build the product specification and documentation.

After assessing the most vulnerable and critical areas of the apps, the Abstracta tester wrote all the test plans and test cases, executing functional, integration, and end-to-end tests and regularly delivered reports of her findings.

The team worked in Agile, primarily in Scrum, utilizing Jira for task tracking as well as Confluence for documentation.

With the Abstracta tester located in Uruguay, real-time communication was enjoyed between the third party developers in Brazil and the SU product team in Silicon Valley.

Video conferencing using Zoom took place weekly and sometimes daily in addition to messaging via Slack.

Further into the engagement, Abstracta recommended automating functional tests cases using Selenium libraries and Java.

Two additional Abstracta testers then joined to script and execute the automated tests, integrating them into its CI pipeline.

Results

For two years, the same full-time Abstracta tester remained an important part of the team behind the development of its Singularity University’s membership portal, SU.org.

The tester worked in an on-going manner to ensure that with each new release, the most critical use cases were covered and that any changes to the apps did not negatively impact their functionality.

As time progressed, Singularity was able to onboard more Abstracta testers, who helped it to define and execute a plan for test automation, for further test coverage, greater incident detection, and faster time to market.