Philz Coffee

Philz Coffee is an American coffee company and coffeehouse chain based in San Francisco, specialising in customized blends of coffee & tea and as food products. As the number of coffee lovers seeking unique tastes grows, the chain with 52 stores wanted to avoid long queues. In 2016, Philz Coffee and technology partner Work&Co started to work on the concept and planning for an Order Ahead Application for the mobile platform. The client was looking for QA support, encompassing Functional, Integration, Performance and Security testing for the application.

Trustworthy and loyal partner

Sten Vaisma, Team Lead at FOB Solutions, says that FOB was contacted mainly because technical testing was not the area of expertise for their existing partner. Also, the project scope and complexity required another layer of QA, acting as an independent and unbiased quality gate before going live. FOB had proven themselves as trustworthy and loyal partners from previous cooperation with Work&Co and already knew the team partially. The strength of the Estonian enterprise was also noted by the fact that they had previously worked in the US market.

Approaching the challenge required very precise planning by the partners. “We had many stakeholders in the project: we, the end customer Philz Coffee and the development companies in New York and Kyiv, all working in different time zones.

Our collaboration model became quite close using the whole 24 hours very efficiently,” says Vaisma. In the planning phase, overall QA implementation had to fit into the existing development pipeline, and estimations for the monthly scope of work had to be set up. Our work started with QA planning, fitting testing into the tight timeline of activities done by already three teams. For precise work execution, a detailed Test Strategy & Test Plan was also created.

Agile approach

Test management covered such areas as improving the test process and leading the test team while creating test deliverables and supporting documentation. Various QA activities also needed continuous planning and management. “The approach to testing is very agile and experience-based. Our strength is adapting as quickly as possible,” notes Vaisma. The consultancy part involved giving feedback about improvement ideas on functionality/design reviews to result in better products for end-users.

“We conducted manual and more technical testing on this project,” says Vaisma. The Functional, Integration, End-to-End and Design testing from the end-user perspective was guided by Context-driven testing principles and an Exploratory testing approach. FOB Solutions QA team of 2.5 FTE also ran non-functional tests for Performance, Load, Concurrency and Security Testing. Vaisma considers the project exciting, mainly because of the large amplitude of testing:

“One might think, how complicated is there to test ordering a cup of coffee? I can easily say it’s the most complicated project I’ve worked on from both functionality/testing perspectives. We were testing the complete ordering cycle, including Customer Application / Barista Application and several administrative tools.”

Testing in an intelligent way 

FOB Solutions uses an expression called “Smart Testing” whenever they talk about assessing quality through Manual Testing activities. This means we consider testing an intellectual process rather than fact-checking – quality goes way beyond that. “Testers should be given the freedom to question the product beyond requirements. Daily work should not be driven by following step-by-step Test Cases. Software is way too complicated to afford to do that anymore. Instead of following steps, we prefer structured exploration!” says Vaisma.

Communication with Philz Coffee and the rest of the team was challenging but well-managed mainly because working across different time zones leaves little to no time for discussions or meetings. “Initially, we created a very precise communication model and used time as efficiently as possible. However, when the next milestone was around the corner, close collaboration of development and testing did reach night hours. That’s not unusual – the whole team goes the extra mile!”

Test methodologies and approaches applied by FOB decrease delivery times and increase the overall value point for a customer. “This can be noted as one of our strengths compared to our competitors in the QA field,” says Vaisma. Ultimately, this means testing was rarely a bottleneck for significant milestones, leading to faster business conclusions and time to market. This also increased product quality post-launch and minimal hotfixes during the maintenance phase. “The client revenue increase resulted mainly due to launching the product itself and therefore increasing customer base, monthly active users and amount of orders,” says Vaisma.