Job search app testing and web development for a US university

Setting up a dedicated development and QA team to deliver job search app testing with 100% automated test coverage as well as two custom web portals for educational institutions across the US.

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Job search app testing and web development for a US university

Context

The customer is a research center at a major US university, creating innovative solutions.

One of their large-scale projects was a job search mobile app for students to choose their future profession from the most suitable employment recommendations. The customer was looking for a vendor to deliver the job search app testing and make sure this product was easy-to-use, intuitive, and relevant in terms of its tech stack, all while meeting a tight deadline and being efficient at communication. Two other goals of this engagement were to develop a teacher portal and a job search web app to mirror the mobile app.

Itransition and the customer had successfully collaborated on mobile projects before. Therefore, the customer was aware of our expertise in the education domain as well as the high quality of our development and software testing services. The customer also appreciated Itransition’s approach to remote collaboration and communication, so they chose us for this project.

Solution

Itransition’s team was responsible for providing quality assurance of the job search mobile app, developing a web app and a teacher portal, as well as overseeing project processes.

Job search app testing in detail

The mobile app tested by Itransition’s QA engineers consisted of the following modules:

User registration and profile creation to pass job interest surveys and save or star preferred professions from the database
Surveys and quizzes for identifying users’ career interests and generating personalized recommendations
Career clusters and pathways, formed for each user based on their quiz results and aligned with the public school curriculum
A database of 1,000+ professions, each featuring a description, an estimated salary, career prospects, education requirements, on-the-job videos, and more.
Likert Scale-based interest assessment with reports containing a list of jobs most suitable for the user, which can be exported

To prepare the mobile app tests, Itransition’s team studied the app documentation and developed a tailored testing plan. We performed tests on real mobile devices using our own device fleet, while also setting up a continuous integration (CI) environment and configuring SonarQube for the customer.

Our delivered testing scope included:

Writing and updating testing documentation
Non-functional testing
Functional testing
GUI testing
Cross-browser testing
Regression testing
Testing validation
Updating existing automated tests on Selenium and writing new tests for the new and enhanced app modules on iOS and Android
Usability evaluation

After fixing all of the detected bugs, we implemented improvements which helped cut the application size by half. Today, our team works in an ad-hoc mode, performing minor updates and tweaking the mobile app on request.

Web app development

The next stage of the collaboration was developing a web version for the same functionality as in the job search mobile app. Since the server part was developed on the customer’s side, we focused our development efforts on the UI side of the app, creating the graphical interface based on the approved mockups.

Parts of the mobile app were replicated in the web app architecture. The rest of the logic was developed by our team in Angular. We chose this web development platform as its structure perfectly matched the structure of the app.

The web app was released to positive reviews, and is projected to be widely used in computer labs at schools nationwide. Currently, we are working on keeping the app updated and properly supported.

Teacher portal development

The online teacher portal developed by Itransition’s web portal developers is an admin space that serves as the back-office for both the mobile and web apps. There too we developed the portal UI after the mockups using Angular. Additionally, we keep providing updates, support, and maintenance for the portal.

The portal features editable user profiles, contact pages, admin lists, school lists, student profile pages, school pages, etc. The portal users are district admins, school admins, counsellors, and teachers.

The portal uses a hierarchical access rights structure where each tier is only able to access information about users contained in the tier below them. For example, only super users can access data related to district admins.

When students submit quizzes, teachers can compare their previous quiz results and give more informed recommendations.

Process

Itransition’s project team consisted of a project manager, team lead, business analyst, developers, program managers, and QA experts. Our Agile manager analyzed the project, participated in onsite meetings with the customer, created the project workflow, collected data about the project team, and updated project cards to create a unified information hub for the team and the customer to navigate.

As part of the project, we set up continuous integration (CI) using universally established automated building, deployment and testing tools such as Bamboo. Setting up CI translated into faster time-to-market thanks to higher code quality and stability, as well as allowed us to build bug fixing right into the process.

Introducing an automated issue finder allowed our engineers to make the development cycle twice as short, while our job search app testing team was able to cut the test running time by 50%. As the customer feedback loop accelerated, we could implement improvements and keep developing at the same time, while being able to assess risks and plan realistically.

Results

During this 19-month-long cooperation with the US university research center, Itransition served as a reliable dedicated development partner, meeting a range of goals from testing the job search mobile app to creating two custom web applications. The team achieved the following results: