Snaptracs, a Qualcomm Inc. subsidiary company, is a global provider of wearable tracking devices for pets. Being one of the major players in the market, it was subsequently acquired by Whistle, a VC-backed world pet technology leader.
Tagg, a GPS Pet Tracker & Activity Monitor, is a wearable device that, with it’s corresponding software product, enables pet owners to remotely locate and track the activities of their pets. The system provides precise GPS information through timely notifications and ensures the well-being of the pet. This is why the mobile app, website accuracy, and speed were of the utmost importance to our client.
To ensure flawless operations and improve the overall performance of the product, Agency73 had to conduct thorough testing and QA automation activities. As the software was already live, the task was time-sensitive and required close cooperation with the client’s team.
Taking this into account, Agency73 needed to do the following:
Work in close cooperation with the product team to ensure instant communication
Improve the overall quality of the software using manual and QA automated testing
Set-up automated feature testing to fully eliminate manual work
WebDriver, the platform and language-neutral interface, was used to automate web application testing. The open source tool, Appium, was chosen as a mobile automation tool for iOS and Android, due to its support for WebDriver library, accuracy and scalability.
In addition, the project toolset included:
The applied efforts resulted in significant time and cost savings: The QA process is now 100% automated and runs independently without any additional engineering effort. This allows the operations and development teams to spend more time improving the system and deploy changes more frequently. With this in mind, we achieved the following results:
Working with a live product, our team could not afford to make any mistakes. Our client received instant feedback on problems caused by changes in the web and mobile application code. This allowed the development team to quickly resolve any issues and eliminate the risk of user failure.
Scrupulous preliminary manual testing conducted by our team, allowed us to eliminate the risks of bugs and design flaws. The sets of tests running after each build resulted in significant end-product quality improvements and therefore, better user retention.
Covering all system features with efficient automated tests allowed us to minimize the need for manual testing over time, and thus reduce QA cost and efforts. The tests run periodically with the Continuous Integration system and provide prompt updates on system status.