Microsoft: Pushing Boundaries to Power QA & Testing

Challenge overview

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 experience to engage a crowdsourced model to gain a different perspective.

Winning solution features

• Innovation through Experimentation: Through experimentation, honest and ongoing dialogue, and a willingness from the Microsoft group to try a new approach, Wipro and Topcoder helped the Microsoft Teams squad innovate on their QA practice.
• Crowdsourcing as the Solution: Crowdsourcing enabled the Microsoft Teams squad to leverage a diverse pool of talent and perspectives to enhance their quality assurance processes and achieve more robust and effective outcomes.

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.
• 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.