Earning market share and carving out a place at the top of an industry is never easy, but maintaining that position at the top can be even more challenging. As a brand’s reputation grows, so does the expectation of quality.
Accellion, a leading file transfer, collaboration and governance software provider, holds its position at the top of its industry by maintaining an intense attention to detail on matters that are often overlooked.
Its premiere content collaboration platform, kiteworks, enables customers to securely share highly-sensitive files with remote employees, external business partners, and clients. Ensuring content security from any location or device requires Accellion to cover a lot of different variables, and it is something the company has excelled at through a comprehensive approach to testing.
As an Agile team executing a weekly sprint cadence, Accellion implements new releases as often as every six weeks.
“With this rapid release cadence, the repetitive nature of our regression testing was a challenge for our team,” explained QA manager Akshay Jaswal. “It was a very tedious process, but was also very important because we needed to ensure we did not introduce, or re-introduce, any errors after implementing new functionality.”
The rigor of moving quickly was also limiting Accellion’s ability to examine its product with a fresh and unfamiliar perspective as part of its review process.
“If someone has been testing the same product for a while, it increases the chances that they will miss something that a new user might have noticed,” said Jaswal.
When it was time to find a solution that addresses these challenges, CEO Jonathan Yaron already had a vendor in mind. “Applause was able to enhance my team’s capabilities at my previous company without adding any overhead,” explained Yaron.
After meeting Mike Weiser, a Solution Delivery Manager and primary point of contact at Applause, Accellion’s team laid out where they were looking for help with their regression testing and what mobile and desktop environments they wanted covered.
From there, Mike was able to put together teams of testers for each of Accellion’s product platforms – Android, iOS, web, and Desktop – and get the testing process started within the next few days.
“Our Applause teams fit seamlessly into our pre-existing product release cycles,” explained Jaswal. “We test all of the new functionality we add throughout the week, and then pass the products to Applause to run regressions over the weekend.”
When Jaswal sits down at his desk on Monday morning, he has access to results that came in over the weekend. As he reviews those results, he can export issues directly into Accellion’s existing bug management workflow to be fixed during the week.
After partnering with Applause, Accellion reduced the time required to complete regression testing from 8 days to 3 days. And by leveraging Applause testers over the weekend, the company is often able to have the entire regression testing process completed within one business day.
Jaswal and his team were also able to ensure that they had the fresh perspective that they were looking for before every release.
“It’s a really easy way to get some additional sets of eyes on our product, especially during our regression testing where it is critically important,” said Jaswal. “With all of the testers on our teams bringing their own unique software testing perspectives and experience to the project, we knew we could count on them for reliable feedback too.”
As Accellion continues to work with Applause, it is able to constantly offer feedback and fine-tune the process of working together.
“At this point, the process of initiating new tests or changes to our testing is almost effortless. Applause is now fully integrated into our software development lifecycle, and is operating as an extension of our own teams.”
Learn more about Applause’s work with Accellion in the full case study.
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