Quality Assurance & Release Management (QA / RM)

As part of the technical build-out, Jibrel has put in place exhaustive release management and quality assurance processes, that will allow for formalized and periodic product release schedules.

Overall Status: Implemented

During the early stages of the project, before on-boarding a dedicated QA / RM manager, as well as the necessary QA engineers, Jibrel’s release process was overly simplistic.

Quality Assurance process prior to Q3 Implementations

The most critical improvement was the introduction of a new Staging environment. This environment is a complete and independent copy of the production environment, including the database. Staging provides a true basis for QA testing because it mirrors the production environment perfectly.

Next, Jibrel introduced Smoke Testing on the Live environment.

Smoke testing, also known as “Build Verification Testing”, is a type of software testing that comprises a non-exhaustive set of tests that aim at ensuring that the most important functions of the Live product work.

QA Process for Build Verification Testing

The outcome of these tests are used to decide if the build is stable enough to proceed with further and more thorough testing.

Smoke Tests are run after deployment to live in order to efficiently check that everything is operating as planned at a high-level. Once Smoke Tests are complete, QA/QC focuses on the creation of test cases and test data preparation.

Jibrel then began to a Continuous Delivery (CD) process. This process involved placing additional checks, particularly that the ticket meets the conditions for CD — i.e. Unit tests passed, Build successful, etc. Once this criteria is deemed to have been met, the build is automatically deployed to development, allowing it to be tested on an environment that perfectly replicates production.

The final step was to introduce a roll-back option to its overall Quality Assurance & Release Management process.

Full QA Process with Roll-back Option

This is the final state Jibrel will use going forward for all implementations to ensure high levels of quality assurance and control. The roll-back option allows for reverting to an earlier iteration when smoke tests fail.

With these processes firmly in place, the QA / RM team have been able to speed-up bug identification and fixes, as well as incorporate community feedback and feature requests.