THE CLIENT
Sago Mini is a Canadian subsidiary of Toca Boca, the No. 1 mobile-first kids brand in the App Store, and is an award-winning kids app & toy company devoted to educational play. Both companies are part of Spin Master, a leading global children’s entertainment company. Sago Mini makes apps, games, and toys for preschoolers worldwide that seed imagination and grow wonder. Its main product, Sago Mini World, comprises 20+ separate games that can be downloaded individually from Google Play and the Apple store. The game can be played on iOS, Android, and Kindle platforms.
THE QA CHALLENGE
Sago Mini only offers its popular educational games on mobile platforms for smartphones and tablets. True to its mission, Sago Mini’s beautifully designed educational games and stimulate positive childhood development. As such, they put a great deal of emphasis on UI which remains a key area of focus in their QA testing efforts. Another challenge that Sago Mini faces is performance. As with most mobile apps, it needs to ensure its games perform well even under different network environments. Additionally, Sago Mini was concerned with whether subscription charges and refunds were correctly applied in China, a growing market Sago Mini wants to expand into. Finally, due to its success and popularity and the relatively relaxed copyrights environment in China, Sago Mini wanted to find out whether its educational games and apps had been pirated in the Asian market.
THE XBOSOFT SOLUTION
XBOSoft has been partnering with a Sago Mini since November 2017 to help in a number of quality testing initiatives, providing a wide range of software testing solutions and expertise combined with in-depth business knowledge of the China market:
PERFORMANCE TESTING
Performance is important for all applications, but especially so for mobile game apps when it comes to StartRender, Load Speed, and Time To First Byte (TTFB). In China, there are 3 national operators: China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom. XBOSoft helped Sago Mini investigate and identify download performance for different handset models for the different operators as well as different wifi settings and wifi scenarios in business, public places (such as coffee shops), and home environments. This information was key to help Sago Mini identify and configure the network parameters to optimize the game experience.
Like most modern apps, Sago Mini mobile applications utilize many built-in API’s. XBOSoft helped the company conduct a series of network performance tests that make up standard API calls under many different platforms over different network environments. Comprehensive test results such as API call status and response time were compiled and reported to Sago Mini to troubleshoot issues.
PAYMENT TESTING
Payment testing is one of the most important elements for mobile games. In China, digital payment has become the predominant form of payment where credit cards and debit cards serve a secondary role. Even for the latter, Unionpay, the Chinese homegrown network has out-competed the more well-known Visa and Mastercard. There were a number of erroneous payment transactions reported by Chinese users of Sago Mini. Armed with the knowledge of the Chinese banking system, XBOSoft was able to identify the problem areas and worked with Sago Mini to correct the problem.
PIRACY INVESTIGATION
Victim of its own success, Sago Mini had long suspected some of its popular Sago Mini World games were being copied and sold illegally in China. It again engaged XBOSoft to investigate the extent of the problem and identify the offenders. XBOSoft scouted the major app markets operated by the largest phone manufacturers of China and indeed found bootlegged copies of its education games. The affected games and their producers were identified and reported back to Sago Mini.
CLIENT TESTIMONIALS
“Communicating clearly from the start, XBOSoft’s team inspires confidence throughout the project. Their ability to adapt to ever-evolving specifications and still produce implementable, on-time deliverables is a hallmark of their work.”
“Their work is very good and their attention to detail is excellant.”
