Case Studies

Product upgrade and maintenance for a leading bioinformatics solutions company

Client is a leading supplier of discovery, collaboration, and knowledge enterprise solutions, desktop software, scientific databases and consulting services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and chemical industries. The Company provides:

Enterprise solutions, desktop software, scientific databases, and professional services for biotechnology, drug discovery and chemical research, including software, databases, and web sites which enable customers to create, analyze and communicate chemical, biological, and scientific information more effectively.

Client Product provides a smooth web-based interface designed to replace paper laboratory notebooks. It streamlines the daily record-keeping of research scientists, consisting of Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, drawings, and spectral data, and can be searched by text and structure. Oracle or SQL Server support allows organizations to share data, as well as maintain rigorous security and efficient archiving.

The client wanted to excel in customizing its product, to meet changing market requirements. The product is used by multiple companies and each one has its own customized requirements. Management of various client customized releases, for different customers was a challenging task. End to end integration and functional testing of a complex business application was becoming difficult to handle, as the number of clients were increasing. Because the software product was available on multiple platforms and in multiple clients specific customized versions were available, the volume of testing for even a single feature change was very large.

Company was facing the following problems:

• Too much of the valuable time of the skilled internal development staff was being absorbed by testing activities.
• Difficulty in meeting the short timeframe's demanded by clients because of the need to test new features separately for each of the multiple client specific versions.
• Keeping up with the documentation and management of a large and rapidly growing volume of test plans was difficult

The client partnered with Q3 on an initial pilot phase. In this phase, a manual testing approach was adopted and the test plans were designed by the client and then executed by Q3. Q3 followed the approach to first stabilize the CORE Project and once the CORE functionality is well tested and is working properly, customer specific changes can be done on CORE and released to multiple clients.

The client was impressed with Q3's thorough methodologies and the quality of Q3's work during the pilot phase and, in the next phase, the client asked Q3 to handle additional aspects including the development of test plans.

Today, the relationship has progressed to the stage that Q3's domain experts are involved in all aspects of quality assurance including the creation and documentation of test plans, and the development and testing of business scenarios. Q3's attention to detail and success in test data reconciliation have given the client increased confidence. Now Q3 is working for nine client project and set up a dedicated team for each of the client customized project.