How Convercent Built Their QA From the Ground Up

Learn how TestRail has given the Convercent team a scalable solution that supports their growing QA team and helped them standardize their test management in a centralized system, maintain meaningful communication between departments, and get higher-quality releases out the door faster.

Before the QA team at Convercent started using TestRail in 2019, the company was very much in startup mode. They were moving quickly to gain market share and had not adequately invested in organizing their testing processes. Because of the fast pace, collaboration across the team was getting more difficult and their test management procedures and systems did not match their expansion.

Testers recorded their test execution in spreadsheets, with sparsely defined standards around test writing strategies, test case documentation, recording results, and tracking test case revisions. Kelli Jordan, the Director of Quality Assurance at Convercent, recalls,

“Everyone was making their best effort to ensure we were testing the product to the level needed to protect the customer experience. But we did not have a definitive way to confidently report that we had protected the customer experience. The QA professionals were uncomfortable with the situation and wanted to do better because our product gives a voice to the voiceless. We all feel strongly about our company mission.” 

One problem with the spreadsheets they used at the time was that they lacked important test-related details. Because of the speed with which the team was delivering features, testers didn’t have the time to fully document their testing strategy. When a defect did leak into production, it was tedious to investigate and identify how to prevent the defect from being reintroduced. This also meant that strategy could not be subjected to peer review. Jordan states,

“We knew we wanted detailed test cases written in a format that allowed others to review and provide feedback for improvement. If the quality of your test cases is not good, the quality of your testing will also not be good. We wanted to maximize the impact of our testing efforts and waste nothing.”

Another part of the challenge they faced was that the testing workload was greater than their understaffed QA team could accommodate. Jordan explains, “Before TestRail, only QA team members could execute test cases.” This created a bottleneck that slowed down releases, threatening revenue and causing frustration among the QA team as well as the rest of the company.

“Before using TestRail, the deployment process took six hours and eight people. Since adopting TestRail and using the TestRail API to integrate with our DevOps scripts, now, a deployment takes three people and 90 minutes to complete. TestRail is a large part of that time reduction.”

By streamlining their test process, improving visibility, and leveraging TestRail’s integrations with test automation and Jira, Convercent’s QA team was able to organize their testing process, gain visibility into their testing so that they could reduce bottlenecks, communicate with each other better, accomplish more testing, and manage resources on their team to meet their deadlines. They were also able to decrease the amount of time that it took to test and deploy applications and reduce the risk of defect leakage.

TestRail has also helped the team successfully transform the culture around quality across the Research and Development department. TestRail is at the center of the cultural changes shaping the way they understand and interact with the QA team. According to Jordan,

“I used TestRail to demonstrate for (non-QA) project members the amount of effort required of QA engineers, and some productive conversations have resulted. Before TestRail, QA throughput was always brought up as a pain point or a problem within Engineering. Now, we have a narrative that is clear for people to understand. QA is no longer perceived as a mysterious bottleneck.”

TestRail has facilitated greater shared responsibility so that quality is not strictly owned by QA, but by the entire team. It has also empowered their QA team to have more meaningful conversations about quality with product owners and developers and helped them build quality into their development process from the outset.

Thanks in part to the tremendous efforts of the QA team, Convercent was acquired in April 2021. They are using TestRail to help scale their QA team and planning to double in size over the next 6 months. Ultimately, TestRail has given the Convercent team a scalable solution that supports their growing QA team and helped them standardize their test management in a centralized system, maintain meaningful communication between departments, and get higher-quality releases out the door faster.

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Learn how TestRail has given the Convercent team a scalable solution that supports their growing QA team and helped them standardize their test management in a centralized system, maintain meaningful communication between departments, and get higher-quality releases out the door faster.