IMPROVING A MICROSOFT-BASED PLATFORM FOR CORPORATE SERVICE MANAGEMENT

Performed design audit and highly customizable redesign

To cover a partial design update and ensure it would seamlessly interact with the current design of the portal, the MobiDev team started with the tech consulting stage and conducted a thorough UX/UI design audit. The primary focus was on improving the user experience (UX) and making the design more intuitive and user-friendly while ensuring it could handle the complexity of the highly customizable interface. Upon completing the audit, the dedicated designers moved directly to the redesign.

Implemented combinatorial testing

Within the ITSM Portal, users deal with a huge number of field type combinations that have variable configurations depending on the customer’s business specifics. Thus, we chose a combinatorial testing method. This approach is commonly used in medical and rocket engineering to handle vast amounts of data in different configurations. Combinatorial testing provided reliable results, ensuring that all types of fields with different mixed configurations interacted properly.

Boosted pairwise testing with the ACTS tool

The next step after deciding on a combinatorial testing approach was to determine the most suitable testing method in terms of accuracy and time efficiency. We recommended pairwise testing since it covers all possible pairs of parameter values with at least one test. According to NASA research, pairwise testing detects 93% of failures, compared to 98% for triplewise testing. Given the project requirements for timeline and accuracy, pairwise testing was confirmed to be the best fit.

To conduct pairwise testing, we needed to determine particular pairs for testing. Manual calculations for this task could have taken dozens of hours, significantly increasing the project budget. To streamline the process, we utilized a specialized tool called ACTS, developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. We created a respective equivalent of classes that represent the project’s functionality and incorporated it into the tool. It took ACTS a few seconds to calculate all the combinations required for testing the project. As a result, instead of performing thousands of possible combinations, we achieved high test coverage with only 37 test cases, which allowed the client to significantly save on budget.

Created high-level documentation for the in-house team

As part of the testing strategy setup, the MobiDev team created detailed documentation on both manual and automated testing that also covered Test Plan Azure DevOps and ACTS. Following this documentation, the Operaio in-house team will seamlessly implement our testing strategy for future versions of the ITSM Portal.