IoT Ecosystem

IoT testing for a hospitality business

About the project

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

Solutions

Optimized time management

We automated the event scheduling process to save freelancers from scattering attention between different platforms and manual settings, allowing them to focus on growing their services and attracting more clients. We allowed users to integrate a scheduling system with several Google Calendars to ensure efficient planning and prevent appointment overlapping.

Customizable service presentation

The client already had a high-level vision of the platform design. Our designer took their idea and used best practices on the market to make the setup experience more intuitive and straightforward so freelancers can start the actual use of the platform fast and without hustle. Moreover, we focused on creating several layout options for the storefronts so freelancers can choose the one better representing their services for the clients.

Analytics for improvement

We developed a personal marketing hub where freelancers can analyze their activity, track their earnings to control their income and identify growth opportunities. The marketing hub also allows freelancers to track customers’ feedback to find their strong sides and potential drawbacks to make the service even better in the future. Detailed analytics enables freelancers to make data-driven decisions regarding their growth and improvement.

Enhanced diversity for future growth

We laid the groundwork for the future scalability of the product, providing an opportunity to expand it to different countries within different time zones. We enabled selecting the system language, choosing within various currencies, and handling time differences. This freedom will allow customers to choose among many quality services and for freelancers to broaden their horizons.

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.”