Scality

Growing too fast – it’s a problem every software company would like to have, but a problem nonetheless. As their company title suggests, Scality offers service providers a solution to quickly scale up their cloud storage capabilities. Using commodity server hardware with direct attached storage, the Paris- and San Francisco-based company delivers the performance and reliability of SAN-based architecture without the hassles of volume management. As summed up in their company tagline, Scality is “simply changing the rules of storage architecture.”

But in late 2010, the company would experience some minor growing pains of their own, in terms of their testing capabilities. Giorgio Regni, CTO of Scality, had been researching ways for the company to test their latest API without burdening in-house resources. After discovering that most outsourcing firms were unwilling to accommodate Scality’s requirements, Regni discovered a company that would: uTest.

This case study will examine how Scality leveraged uTest’s services to run a series of tests on their REST object storage API prior to deployment. Along the way, we’ll cover the basics of the uTest community, as well as uTest’s project management and testing processes.

Scality’s Testing Objectives and Services
Like all new uTest customers, Scality would kick things off by meeting with uTest’s project management team. After determining the company’s objectives, uTest would assemble a custom team of testers based on their criteria.

“We really wanted people to test the software without any prior knowledge as to how it worked,” said Regni. “A lot of the low-level testing is done in-house, but our engineers know too much about the functionality. We needed professional testers, but ones that would more closely resemble our customer base.”

After a few days of setup and preparation, Scality’s project was ready to go. Their services included:

• Exploratory testing of the Scality API and cloud storage platform
• Multiple rounds of testing on both existing API and new API
• Detailed bug reports and analysis
• Dedicated uTest Project Manager
• 10+ days of diagnostic analysis
• 24/7 access to uTest platform