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Creating, executing, and maintaining reliable tests has never been easier.
Few industries have been pushed to the edge like education has over the last twelve months. As students around the world abruptly transitioned to remote learning, Friend of mabl and education tech startup FineTune needed to ensure that their assessment platform was ready to support thousands of educators and students around the globe.
Automating tests for complex applications
FineTune bridges the gap between teachers and students with their AI-powered qualitative assessment platform, which enables training and education organizations from The College Board to local schools to administer secure, meaningful tests online. Founded in 2011, the Boston-based startup provides millions of students, trainees, and educators the ability to continue building their skills with consistent, reliable assessments backed by AI. As an enthusiastic adopter of the new mabl desktop app, we went behind the scenes with the FineTune quality team to understand how they’re streamlining and accelerating testing in a company that experienced exponential growth overnight.
Testing journeys for a wide range of users
One of the biggest challenges with testing the FineTune platform is the number of potential user pathways. For traditional education, different user levels like administrator, teacher, and students need different permissions, UIs, and dialogues, all of which need to be tested. Adding to the complexity is the fact that the FineTune platform also serves workplace trainers, adding entirely new classes of users that need specific functions and pathways. For Jay Trommer, Head of Quality at FineTune, managing this growing workload with his team of five was a significant challenge.
With mabl, Jay and his team are able to better focus their testing efforts. Each new release required significant amounts of manual testing, and regression testing that would take several days to complete. The option to run tests locally with the help of the mabl desktop app, has further reduced the time required to thoroughly test new releases, as local tests are typically completed in less than a minute. The app helps to centralize testing across all user paths so developing a cohesive automated testing plan is easier, streamlining quality operations.
Simple test creation in a clean browser
When testing an application as complex as the FineTune platform, small tasks like creating a clean browser with the right user settings add up quickly and increase the risk of tests rendered useless by bad cached data. The mabl desktop app eliminates the burden of resetting browsers by automatically opening a clean browser, ensuring that tests are executed correctly and that Jay’s team doesn’t need to spend unnecessary time resetting their browser between tests.
As the team shifts the bulk of regression testing to mabl’s test automation platform, this simplified test creation process saves FineTune even more time on routine testing tasks and enables them to focus on high-impact manual testing and improving their overall testing strategy. One recent win: being able to test new student/teacher interaction cases, where the team tested the entire exam user journey from assigning the assessment, completing the test, and grading to ensure both students and teachers have an intuitive experience.
The simplified automated test creation process in the mabl desktop app has another benefit: giving Jay time to onboard new team members. One member of their customer support team interested in pursuing a career in QA has started her testing journey by examining manual tests that identify bugs and seeing if they can be performed in mabl. This way, she’s able to learn both manual and automated tests, and contribute to FineTune's quality engineering practice.
The future of quality learning
The need for effective assessment is only going to grow as education looks to become more accessible and more companies shift to long-term remote work. To ensure that FineTune remains the leading resource for AI-backed, secure qualitative assessments, Jay and his team are planning to expand their use of test automation with mabl to enable better, faster testing. Jay plans to further expand application coverage, increase performance testing across environments, and grow mobile automation coverage across multiple devices.
Are you a quality leader in edtech? See how mabl can support quality engineering for your team by signing up for a free 14-day trial!
