Bongo Case Study

THE CLIENT

Bongo is a video assessment platform that enables experiential learning and soft skill development at scale. Soft skills matter in that they directly impact communication and collaboration capabilities. Bongo’s structured video workflows help organizations facilitate spaced skill practice, personalized feedback, and the application of knowledge within a real-world environment. Bongo was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in Loveland, Colorado.

THE QA CHALLENGES

The product was originally built on PHP and utilized lots of 3rd party software. This had certain advantages early on but presented limitations as the company and product complexity grew. Bongo decided to migrate everything to AWS as well as completely upgrade and redo their product front-end. This improved security and allowed integration into a video solution that leveraged AWS AI to track and analyze eye contact, speed of speech, and frequency of filler words among various user traits. In the process, a significant defect backlog developed. Additionally, the old code base had some design issues that contributed to high-level defects. Bongo realized they needed assistance with software QA and sought an experienced vendor that would provide independent 3rd party validation of their product quality.

Bongo selected XBOSoft for a trial period. Bongo specifically commented back to XBOSoft on the quality of XBOSoft’s engineers, quickness in ramping up product knowledge, and the number and quality of defects discovered in the trial. Based on XBOSoft’s flexibility to expand the testing scope to cover full functional and regression testing, performance and stability testing, user experience, and incorporation of test automation into the QA process, Bongo subsequently moved to a full parternship.

THE XBOSOFT SOLUTION

Bongo’s business plans include rapid growth of their Educational user base and expansion into new markets such as internal corporate training and business consulting. XBOSoft assigned a fully dedicated team employing a hybrid onsite/offshore model. The QA program consisted of the following:

General functional testing for complete regression	API verification via GraphQL
Mobile Testing – iOS and Android	Verification of world-wide production environments after each hotfix and major upgrade
Network variability, reliability testing, and firewall testing	Periodic verification of basic functionality in production environments to augment automated monitoring
Test automation on user interface using Selenium working with Hunter utilizing Ruby	Utilized expertise with D2L, Cengage, Canvas, Moodle, and stand-alone environments for full end to end integration testing

THE RESULTS

1. In the first six months:

Over 500 defects found
Customer support issues dropped by nearly 50%
Improved scheduling and consistency of releases. Agile development with 2-week Sprints covering planning, implementation, and testing

2. Structured QA program established

Thousands of test cases, scenarios, and test data in the form of video/assignments/courses created.
Test cases with defect tracking linked to original business requirements.

3. Produce daily reports of coverage, findings, and questions

Utilized by Tech Lead for daily planning and to determine whether feature branches are good enough to be merged, which parts need additional attention, and which parts of code need to be returned to programmer.
Characterization and documentation of defect reproduction steps including videos.

4. Bongo’s product release protocol for what to release, when to release, and how much confidence with this release is now based on XBOSoft’s Quality Release Report, thus using True Independent 3rd Party Validation from XBOsoft.

CLIENT TESTIMONIALS

“Collaboration with XBOSoft has been great. One of the things XBOSoft has done really well is build up the relationship. They’ve learned not only what the product does, but understand our business. Their domain expertise makes a huge difference.”

Richard Robinson, QA Director

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