Case Study: Microsoft Azure & .NET-Based Platform For Enterprise IT & Business Management

Client: itnetX, Microsoft Partner and service provider for modern business and IT solutions for digital transformation

Business goals: Provision of enterprises with a modular SaaS platform for modelling and managing business and IT processes

Product: pocketBricks, microservice-based platform with rich functionality, based on Microsoft technologies (.NET and Azure services)

Applied technologies: Agile management framework (Scrum), .NET stack, Microsoft Azure (Service Fabric, Blob, Azure Table Storage), OData, MS SQL, manual testing, Postman for API testing

Joining a project under development
with .NET & quality assurance expertise

Filling the expertise gap

Microsoft is well-known for its focus on enterprise needs, while Azure is a common choice for cloud-based enterprise solutions. Today's story is about one of these, conceived and developed by itnetX, Switzerland-based Microsoft Partner. Having a previous experience of creating enterprise-grade software products, they addressed us for corresponding expertise. We had to join in and align our work with the project processes in the most immediate, convenient way, so as to follow the client's strict scheduling with daily communication.

Microsoft Azure as a standard for corporate software

The Azure services that we used for the platform include Service Fabric, Blob, and Table Storage; the first use case implemented with our help concerned the HR management module of the system. It automates employee profile creation and management, allowing to take several steps in one quick provision. This module was showcased at Microsoft Inspire 2018 and garnered positive response. Further components under development include workflow, reporting, billing, and asset management—and the first version is scheduled for release in Q1 2019.

Setting up the testing process and writing testing documentation

Our quality assurance skills proved useful when it came to shaping a robust and consistent testing process on the project. Together with the client's team, we elaborated and validated a flow that documents all activities and responsibilities of QA team members. This was followed by an analysis of testing environments and formation of documentation comprising checklists and test cases. Additionally, we introduced a special plugin that allowed to manage test cases in Visual Studio Team Services.

Sergey Ivanov, Quality Assurance Group Leader

"The greatest benefit brought by QA is that defects can be prevented before they are implemented. It takes way less time to edit the specification or to include a solution in the code than rewriting it, trying to fix something. In other words, QA saves the product owner's time and money from the very beginning of the project on idea stage, during development and even after product release."