The brief
Our client, Thrive Tribe, is a digital wellbeing start up. They create long-term habit and behaviour change through a range of lifestyle and wellbeing programmes, making employees and communities happier and healthier with a focus on helping their clients with losing weight and giving up smoking.
They approached us after hearing about our reputation for doing excellent quality work with sophisticated processes, as they needed us to build an end-to-end automation and quality assurance (QA) strategy for them.
Thrive Tribe’s business model depends on them making sure their services are high quality, robust and reliable.
It takes courage and willpower to make life-style changes like weight loss or quitting smoking. So, Thrive Tribe’s and our priority was to make sure that nobody encountered any glitches or issues that could take any of that momentum away.
Smooth and effective implementation
Part of the brief was to ensure we came up with a strategic approach that would complement the goals of Thrive Tribe. When we had agreed the strategy details, we assembled a crack team of our experienced engineers to work with each of Thrive Tribe’s product team, and aligned to their agile team structure to provide QA for their entire service development life cycle.
As our engineering lead commented, “2i partnered with Thrive Tribe as they started their product development journey. Thrive Tribe’s desire to bake quality and efficiency into their product development journey led to an automation-first approach. We placed 2i engineers within their internal development teams to advocate for quality and embed testing to the delivery pipeline, which enabled Thrive Tribe to fix quality into their mindset, their product and their future approach.”
The key was building quality into the system from the start of the development process, by testing the coding throughout each step, rather than waiting for the testers at the final stage to flag any issues late in the day. Or, even worse, having issues pointed out by real users.
The results
Our comprehensive, rigorous processes have given our client high quality experiences that they and their users can trust and rely on, and we’re proud to say that Thrive Tribe has had a remarkably smooth and robust user experience ever since going live.
As our client observed, “By eliminating manual testing, and engaging 2i to embed an automation-first approach from the project’s inception, our time-to-market was significantly reduced, ensuring a successful product launch. This was particularly crucial with us being a start-up; establishing ourselves in the marketplace and satisfying our investors.”
It’s often effective to think outside the box and it’s not our style to join the dots the same way every time. We look at each project afresh and take a novel approach to finding the best ways to provide a cost-effective and streamlined service that we’re confident will meet our client’s needs.
In this case, it meant that one of our innovative user and session testing approaches cut 40% of time off the testing process for one of their services, which accelerated product launches and enhanced their competitiveness in the marketplace.
We also took an innovative approach to account registration and email testing, and allocated a significant resource into effective test data management and accessibility testing.
Speed and performance is everything to Thrive Tribe’s brand and credibility – without effective QA they risk compromising user experience and satisfaction, so giving them the peace of mind of thoroughly tested products is invaluable.
Confident in the results of our collaboration, they were then able to sell their services into Councils throughout the country, enabling many thousands of people to access effective and safe services that will help them on their health journey.
And, to use the old adage ‘a stitch in time saves nine’, the better job you do early on, with the right technology embedded in the system, the less likely faults will occur later, which could require costly retrospective fixes.
Working together
2i and Thrive Tribe’s collaboration on this project was, by all accounts, a great success. They appreciated the quality of our work, having total faith in the processes we put in place, and they always gave us the highest client satisfaction scores.
If satisfaction scores worked the other way around, our engineers would have scored Thrive Tribe highly too, as they loved working on site in their innovative space surrounded by green fields.
We assigned one of our team members to each of Thrive Tribe’s internal testers, to train them, mentor them and bring them up to speed to be self-sufficient and proficient ongoing.
As Thrive Tribe enthused, “2i’s commitment to a safe, quick and reliable QA approach aligned seamlessly with our culture. The compatibility in working methods and shared ethos really solidified our partnership.”
It says a lot that a start-up with limited funding appreciated the value of investing in high quality testing, and we were delighted to deliver exactly what they needed, on time and to budget.