Case Study

Ensuring the quality of smart city services

Take the model of a future city: a neighborhood imagined as a set of services and structures innervated by a technology platform, called Global System Model (a platform for urban systems born from the collaboration between Gewiss, Siemens and Microsoft). Here, people can fully manage not only their flat but all the aspects of their life in the neighborhood. We ensured the quality of the entire smart city platform with an agile approach, integrating the quality process in all the phases (from development to delivery)  to validate the mobile app (Android and iOS), cloud services and the web portal.

#Smart city

A revolution in the real estate market

Our client is a real estate development and promotion company, specialized in design solutions to reshape urban areas around the world. They innovate in the field by applying digital servitization solutions to real estate: their revolutionary technological platform allows plant systems and the digital infrastructure of buildings to communicate with each other through their digital twin. This ensures complete management integration and the best conditions for well-being, living comfort, safety and respect for the environment.

How to ensure quality validation within tight deadlines

The customer's goal is to validate the functional aspects of the mobile platform (Android and iOS), the cloud services, and the Web Portal. To align with the fast delivery pace, the testing has been integrated using Azure Pipelines that execute the developed automated test suites to perform the needed validations at every merge/commit providing fast and reliable feedback.

Based on the test automation strategy created and shared with the relevant stakeholders, we defined the test phases, tools, quality gates/processes and deliverables. The solution includes a continuous testing pipeline that is expanded, sprint by sprint, to cover and validate new features for the mobile app (Android and iOS), the REST services and the web portal. Automation accelerates the build and deploy cycle by checking code and running tests continuously, providing feedback within minutes. For this reason, all the automated tests developed with our framework will be implemented in a CI/CD pipeline.

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More than 250 user flows (covering mobile app, web Administration portal app, and API touchpoints) automated

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Test automation solution integrated into the Azure CI/CD ecosystem, to be triggered at every product release

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Quality level assured with direct support for defect management

The testing approach

The testing stage can be broken down into multiple parts based on the objective of your test suites, each of which is designed to ensure the software meets the original business requirements. With the right tool, you can run regression tests to re-test scenarios each time a change is made to ensure the application’s existing functionality hasn’t been broken. For this purpose, and to follow the same approach and tools of the development team, we adopt the Azure DevOps tools and infrastructure, in particular:

Azure Repos

A set of version control tools that you can use to manage your code

Azure Test Plan

A service launched with Azure DevOps that provides a browser-based test management solution for exploratory, planned manual, and user acceptance testing. Azure Test Plan also provides a browser extension for exploratory testing and gathering feedback from stakeholders.

Azure Pipelines

Azure Pipelines automatically builds and tests code projects to make them available to others. It works with just about any language or project type. Azure Pipelines combines continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to test and build your code and ship it to any target.

Azure App Center

An integrated mobile development lifecycle solution for iOS, Android, Windows and macOS apps. It brings together multiple services commonly used by mobile developers, including build, test, distribute, monitoring, diagnostics, etc., into one single integrated cloud solution. By connecting a specific repository, it is possible to automate builds and tests on real devices in the cloud, distribute apps to beta testers, and monitor real-world usage with crash and analytics data.

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Concept Reply specializes in the research, development, and validation of innovative solutions in the IoT (Internet of Things) field. Today, we are recognized as a center of expertise and excellence in Testing and Quality Assurance, and include a Business Unit that specializes in this service. Thanks to our laboratories and to an international team of professionals specializing in the QA and Validation fields, we are able to offer companies end-to-end support for the validation of products and services, while also optimizing costs and time-to-market.