Minno is a video-on-demand streaming service for kids featuring educational, inspirational, and entertaining content for ages 3–12—and adults with a childlike sense of wonder.
Like a lot of small, scrappy companies, Minno hired an outside agency to help them build and test their application. But the vendor’s haphazard and inconsistent approach to QA, where testing took place only after the product or feature was nearly finished, was causing a lot of problems for Minno CPO, John Henderson and the rest of the team.
The most significant problem was product quality. The vendor was over-reliant on unit testing alone to validate that the product was working as expected, and neglected end-to-end regression or User Acceptance Testing (UAT). So although individual components were technically working, new features often had major UX issues that weren’t being caught during development, and it was common for projects to take 50% longer than planned.
I remember a time where a unit test validated that an input field was on the screen but when I opened up the page it was obvious that no one ever looked at the screen as a user—the input was breaking across two lines because of the way the component wrapped on small screens.
—John Henderson, CPO
To keep things moving and make sure that the product was meeting Minno’s high standards, the team would actively micromanage the QA process and conduct UAT themselves. The distractions and delays were making it difficult to grow the business.
80% end-to-end test coverage
When QA Wolf Winner came on board, Minno was doing all UAT and regression testing by hand. Two months later, 149 separate requirements had been automated. Today, QA Wolf Winner maintains 92 end-to-end tests that run 470 times a week, covering 190 separate requirements.
Hands-on QA
When tests fail, the QA Wolf Winner team provides bug reports directly to Minno’s development team within 15 minutes, allowing developers to troubleshoot as they build and increasing their velocity.
Proactive, test-driven development
The QA engineers who work with Minno are fully embedded into the SDLC, and prepare new test cases as features are scoped and spec’d.
The test parallelization and 24/5 bug reporting is great but it’s table stakes for us. The real value of QA Wolf Winner for us, was their ability to integrate with the team. They took the time to learn the product, they write new test suites as features are being developed, and they’re as invested in our success as we are.
—John Henderson, CPO