Bitly is the world's leading Connections Platform, providing a way for brands and businesses to build more meaningful connections with their audiences both online and offline. As a leading global SaaS company, Bitly empowers millions of monthly active users and hundreds of thousands of customers globally to use Bitly Links, Bitly Codes, Bitly Pages, and Bitly Analytics as a trusted way to engage their audience and deliver critical notifications, information, and experiences.
We talked to Bitly's Director of Quality Assurance, Alisa Demennikova, about what motivated the Bitly team to leave their previous test management system (TMS) and how their QA operations have changed since their migration to Qase.
The search for a new TMS was sparked by a team that was frustrated with the lack of collaboration and transparency provided by the previous TMS. The team needed a tool that would empower them to improve communication within the team, provide greater visibility into testing processes, and embrace a more data-driven approach to QA.
Bitly needed a tool that brought the whole team together
While using their previous TMS, Bitly’s QA and development teams were disconnected. Lack of access to that TMS left developers out of the loop, forcing the team to supplement with Excel spreadsheets for their test management process.
“The real impact of using a tool that didn’t provide enough visibility was that our development team was not deeply involved in all of the manual QA processes,” says Alisa, “They only had surface-level knowledge of what was happening with QA and not a deeper understanding of ‘what does this actually mean? What value does this add?'’’
Meanwhile, the team struggled with the outdated UI and felt frustrated by occasional lags or disruptions. The disjointed system left the team unmotivated to use the tool at all. “Our TMS functioned more as a storage repository for test scenarios rather than an actively used tool,” says Alisa.
When Alisa joined Bitly, the team was overdue for a change. “The team was constantly frustrated with their TMS, but there was never the ‘proper’ time to look for another tool. I had a lot of talks with the manual QA engineers and we started to look for a tool that would give us more transparency in terms of communicating testing stages and phases for our development teams.”
Alisa worked with her team to establish the requirements for the new test management system. Eventually, they narrowed it down to three must-haves:
- A modern, intuitive UI that would provide a better user experience
- Ability to easily migrate all their data from previous TMS into the new tool
- Option to provide some team members with read-only access
Bitly needed a tool that would enable them to scale their work efficiently and it needed to be something the team would actually want to use. The UX of their previous tool was a major deterrent and the inability to bring stakeholders and developers into the TMS severely limited visibility, making it difficult to keep the whole team on the same page.
“We have a lot of developers and team members who need to be on the informed/consultant side but not be active users. Our problem was solved with Qase read-only users. Now, people are able to find and understand the information they need through the appropriate level of access.”
Qase met all of Bitly’s requirements, along with some of their “nice-to-haves.” “I don’t know if we should count this, but Qase’s dark mode was a motivator,” Alisa laughs, “it came up in discussions when comparing tools.”
Alisa says that the team had to maintain their regular sprint and release cycles during the migration, but the process of switching to Qase was straightforward and went quite smoothly. Plus, it gave them an opportunity to restructure their test suites and create a foundation for more efficient work.
Qase enabled Bitly to rebuild their QA process in a more organized way
The dynamic nature of Bitly’s agile teams requires a lot of ad-hoc testing, but their previous TMS setup rarely allowed them to use the TMS for this purpose. This led to situations where, despite having a comprehensive set of test scenarios, they weren’t able to leverage them effectively, which diminished the overall efficiency of their testing process.
The Bitly team used the migration to Qase as an opportunity to rebuild their QA process. “The ultimate goal is to bring everything into Qase and have Qase as our single source of truth,” says Alisa.
“Qase’s Jira integration has been transformative. It allows us to document and attach test scenarios or executions directly to Jira tickets, providing seamless visibility and communication between the testing and development teams.”
Qase allows the team to build more comprehensive test suites and reduce redundant work. “We’ve been able to advocate for implementing a process that allows us to have a dedicated time slot per sprint where our manual QAs are focused on adding new scenarios in Qase that cover the features developed throughout the sprint,” says Alisa.
Switching to Qase also empowered the Bitly team to start using test runs and become more committed to reporting properly on all tests. Now, the entire department is more data and metrics-driven. Whether it’s for a particular feature or a bigger release, Qase provides the visibility Bitly needs to monitor the amount of tests added and executed, ensure features were properly tested, and serve as the source of truth for QA operations.
Bitly leverages Qase to optimize their testing processes
A combination of Qase’s features and a shift in mindset for the Bitly team has helped them make more data-informed decisions to fine-tune their testing procedures. “We’re now able to use metrics to understand the level at which our manual QAs are currently loaded with different testing activities so that we can help unload them, provide more automation, and allow our manual QAs to focus more on process improvements,” says Alisa.
“Qase’s Shared Steps feature has been instrumental in optimizing our testing processes. It allows us to build comprehensive test suites using reusable components, significantly reducing redundancy, and saving time. This feature not only streamlines test creation but also ensures consistency and efficiency across our test scenarios.”
Alisa explains that as an Accessibility Ambassador at Bitly, she is especially happy with how Shared Steps support their accessibility testing. The team has certain accessibility standards to fulfill that require each feature to be tested in a similar way, so a templatized approach is ideal.
The Bitly team created Shared Steps groups that contain more than 20 steps each to cover two accessibility testing scenarios. Now, rather than manually creating 20+ steps for every run, testers can simply select the Shared Step group based on their scenario.
“It’s great because when you are creating a test run based on one of these two scenarios, you can apply the Shared Steps group,” says Alisa, “Our accessibility verification is standardized. You don’t even have to think, you mark the steps that are needed for the current test, skip the rest, and boom, in 5 seconds, you're done.”
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