Upstream engineers share knowledge attained through development of custom quality assurance tools
London, May 10th, 2018 – Upstream, who is leading the mobile internet revolution in high growth markets, has hosted two sell-out workshops on quality assurance test automation in microservice architecture with the GRTB, the Greek branch of the ISTQB (International Software Testing Qualifications Board). The workshops were aimed at an audience of QA managers and engineers and were run by George Pagomenos, Upstream Quality Assurance Manager and Sokratis Sidereas, Upstream Test Automation Architect, who also gave keynote speeches at the event.
Conducting business in a diverse range of 45+ high-growth markets, Upstream’s business model requires apps to be easily modified for a wide range of customer preferences and country specific considerations. One way to approach this is through the utilisation of microservice architecture, the process of building an app out of many smaller applications instead of one monolithic application, thereby allowing developers to change one part of the app without needing to re-write the whole application when making minor changes. From a quality assurance perspective, it is easier and quicker to run tests if you know you are only changing one part of an app, however you still need to test the various combinations and variations of microservice building blocks.
The team at Upstream found that as the business scaled, they needed to make innovative modifications to the quality assurance tools available so that they could meet the clients’ need for high-quality solutions. The team has therefore both adapted existing methodologies and built new tools from scratch to meet Upstream’s specific needs. Today, Upstream is able to run thousands of end to end tests overnight.
George Pagomenos, Upstream Quality Assurance manager, commented: “The team has had to think creatively to solve a variety of challenging technical issues. Each market we serve has a unique set of software and cultural parameters we need to adapt our products to. Microservice architecture is broadly used across cloud-based applications and by companies the size of Netflix, yet we repeatedly found that the tools we needed were either inadequate or just didn’t exist. The work the team has done in creating the right tools for the job from scratch has been incredible, and we wanted to showcase our capabilities and leading position in testing micro-service architecture to the broader industry. The attendees of the event have been shown some of today’s most cutting-edge innovations in QA testing, the learnings from which they can take into their own work. The fact that both workshops were sell-out events also demonstrates the interest in this.”
