News International

With more than four thousand employees, as well as its own postal code, News International is one the largest media companies in the world. A division of News Corporation, the UK-based company is most known for being publisher of The Times, The Sun, News of the World and The Sunday Times.

In 2010, News International took the bold and pioneering move to move to a ‘paid for content’ business model for a number of its digital titles. This brave move would include the introduction of an iPad version of The Times and The Sunday Times. On that news, Christian Henderson, the company’s Head of Test and Release Management, began searching for an efficient way to test the functionality of the iPad apps under real-world scenarios.

Researching his options, Christian concluded that traditional QA agencies and outsourcing firms would not be able to match uTest is terms of cost, time or expertise.

“The use of contractors from our PSL works well in some areas of the testing lifecycle and products,” he said. “But in this instance we needed specific skill-sets. We required a more defined, focused, streamlined and experienced, low-cost test solution acting out ‘real world’ scenarios- and this is what uTest provided.”

Testing Set Up and Execution

Needing to cover as many angles as possible, Christian was pleased to learn that uTest had already equipped its top testers with iPad devices – making it easy for them to test their app by device, OS version, location, carrier and other categories. From there, Christian would upload specific test cases designed to reflect the actions of their real-world user base. As part of their functional and exploratory test cycles, testers were instructed to focus on:

• Crash defects
• Subscriptions
• Downloading sections within an Edition
• Continuity of user journey
• Wi-Fi, 3G and edge connections

With time-to-market also being a major concern for Christian, uTest was able to compress their test cycle into durations of between five and nine days.