Microsoft

Pushing boundaries to power QA & testing

Structured Regression and In-the-Wild QA Performed Every 7th Day through Crowdsourcing

“Microsoft teams is a global product, so using crowdsourcing actually opens up the scenarios of having global testers which is traditionally more difficult when we have a captive team model. ”

Caleb Tseng, Microsoft Engineer

#

About Microsoft Teams

Teams, Microsoft’s popular work collaboration tools suite that canvasses chat, video, file sharing, collaborative docs and more is one of the fastest growing products at Microsoft. But the product leaders at Microsoft aren’t resting on their laurels, in fact, they’re hitting the gas.

The Challenge

The product team at Microsoft has adopted a modern delivery philosophy, including 7-day sprints and best practices utilizing a CICD (continuous integration, continuous delivery) cadence. In lay terms, they are pushing a lot of code, features, and UX improvements, all the time.

While modern delivery methods have evolved, driving efficiencies and velocity gains, QA and testing practices have tended to lag behind. The team from Microsoft saw this as a unique opportunity.

THE SOLUTION

Through experimentation, honest and ongoing dialogue, and a willingness from the Microsoft group to try a new approach, Wipro and Topcoder helped the Teams squad innovate on their QA practice, and crowdsourcing was at the heart of the solution.

“The ability to have our developers focus and develop features quickly and get that fast response time… that’s been super helpful, having that tight feedback loop.”

Alex Duong, Engineering Manager, Microsoft

Impact

Wipro and Topcoder delivered the ability to execute 24-hour testing cycles every single week, increasing Microsoft’s testing velocity and matching their product team’s dev release cadence. Via on-demand testing on Topcoder, ramp-up & ramp-down was made simple and a world-wide community of testers continuously provided feedback and documented defects, while helping Microsoft achieve wider test coverage across more devices and operating systems.