IoT Ecosystem

IoT testing for a hospitality business

About the company

Our client was a B2B company bringing innovations to the field of beverage dispensing. The company used IoT devices to ensure flawless and contactless access to beverages, which helps hospitality businesses to increase sales and improve service quality. They installed their hardware in hotel chains, stadiums and arenas, performing arts theaters, cruise ships, and other verticals.

The company’s innovative approach to remote management and dispensing as a service has changed the industry, resulting in high demand for their IoT solutions.

Business challenges

The company was expanding their services and constantly enhancing their product to ensure partners can reliably serve their customers. Working in the hospitality industry, their partner businesses were highly sensitive to service interruptions; any changes or updates to the core product required systematic and extensive quality assurance checks.

When our client came to us, they already had two specialists responsible for hardware testing. They asked SysGears to establish quality assurance processes for their software and ensure reliable software-to-hardware integration, continuous system stability, and consistent product performance.

What we offered

Balanced approach

QA services are always about finding the balance between effort required and the probability of discovering an issue. Our engineers used combinatorial test design techniques to ensure complete feature coverage while spending the minimum effort possible to execute all test runs. Knowledge of the system and interactions between its parts, as well as using various tools for backend, frontend, and database testing, allowed our specialists to conduct complex testing procedures.

Testing automation

Considering the project’s long-term strategic goals and relying on our experience, our manual QA engineers were continuously identifying established functionality to cover with automated tests with the help of automation tools. Automation helps to keep project testing efforts to a minimum, balancing effort spent on automation and maintenance with the effort of executing tests manually. Thanks to such an approach, quality assurance for all product features can be conducted efficiently without adding more and more manual testing specialists as the product’s feature set grows.

Device emulation

Working in concert with the client’s existing hardware testing personnel, our team identified and built mechanisms to emulate interactions between IoT hardware devices and the client’s rich software stack. For example, our team came up with a testing approach that relies on emulators to check the interactions of multiple devices connected to the system, ensuring the stable performance of large device networks before a fleet-wide rollout.

Team scaling

We started with one part-time quality assurance engineer to augment the client’s team and bolster their QA processes, such as preparing test documentation, establishing new workflows, and continuously testing the platform, including IoT integrations. As the functionality grew, our QA engineer started working full-time, and later we added one more QA specialist. Thanks to scalable workflows, comprehensive documentation, and well-set processes, onboarding and adaptation of the new team member took minimal effort.

Technologies

Swagger

Postman

View the PDF

Client feedback

“As our organization has grown over the years, SysGears has remained an invaluable Partner to Sestra, providing the right type of expertise to our rapidly expanding solution and customer base.”

Ben Maphis

VP Engineering, Sestra Systems

Clutch

5.0

“SysGears exhibits great flexibility, adaptability, and receptiveness towards the client’s needs. Should the client consider expanding their team, they have the ability to immediately provide highly qualified engineers that can integrate well with internal development staff.”