In collaboration with the National Software Testing Conference, we interviewed James Mortlock, Vodafone’s User Acceptance Testing (UAT) Lead. He is responsible for Testing and Quality Assurance (QA) for the My Vodafone app, Vodafone digital storefronts, websites and digital marketing. Vodafone brought in Applause to provide unbiased user testing of all its digital products before they go to market.
Learn more about it below:
Embracing the Agile approach
Leaving all testing until the end of the software development process can result in major issues being discovered too late, pushing back timelines and driving up costs. That’s why Vodafone’s UAT department, under James Mortlock’s leadership, decided to adopt an Agile approach and “shift left”, performing its testing earlier in the development cycle
“Agile allows you to identify issues early on, so you can fix them more easily, quickly, and cheaply,” James explains. “You can start thinking in terms of hours or days, testing and releasing features in small chunks so you can provide customers with value much more frequently. Quality also increases because you can focus on one feature at a time and better respond to changing customer requirements.”
Deciding to make the move to Agile can be daunting; team leads may spend months building a case, looking for an internal sponsor and deciding on a roll out plan. At Vodafone, James’ team decided to “just rip the plaster off” and get started immediately. He describes how his team “embraced the Agile idea of using our user stories as a bible for everything. We’re not delivering work items or code – we’re trying to build a story for a user to go through. They’re called user stories for a reason!”
He continues, “This works well for UAT because it allows developers to do what they’re good at – namely finding ways to solve problems in their code.”
This focus on the user story encouraged James to build in crowdtesting, which is where Applause came in. Crowdtesting gives organisations the ability to test every real-world scenario and environment imaginable — and Applause has the world’s largest and most experienced community of digital experts and end users.
Go-to resource for testing
Applause has worked with Vodafone in various capacities for several years. In 2020, for instance, Vodafone was rolling out its fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) broadband and needed properties in which to test it. Applause has a huge testing community with significant assets that Vodafone could make use of, including – in this case – the houses in which they live. Working with its community of testers, Applause found properties in very specific postcodes, allowing Vodafone to test the end-to-end connections and have confidence before rolling out its proposition further.
Since then, Applause has become the go-to resource for the final stage of testing to ensure everything is working properly before it’s rolled out, and now has a significant digital functional testing contract with Vodafone.
Working with Applause, Vodafone’s UX department created the metric “uCASTe” (user: Comprehension, Attractiveness, Satisfaction, Trust, emotion), designed to turn qualitative user feedback into quantitative outcomes. Every test Applause runs generates a uCASTe score, quickly and at scale, providing live feedback in sprint and giving Vodafone – and its UAT team – huge levels of granularity in its data.
Thinking more like a user
Capturing user feedback is crucial, according to James: “You don’t want to launch a product and then get the feedback, you want to simulate that feedback before launch.”
“Once you embrace Agile as a new way of working, crowdtesting is another new avenue you can explore,” says James. “Global teams can be built on request, with testers that are either familiar or purposefully unfamiliar with your products. Instead of having monolithic QA teams that aren’t really doing much for parts of the year, you can scale crowdtesting as and when you need them while building predictability into your workflows.”
James describes the user point of view as the biggest advantage of crowdtesting: “There are many different ways you can use it. You can carry out UAT in sprint and then get a final perspective from users, or you can use the testers to rip apart the journey at the start, before you’ve even built the wireframes.”
This perspective has the additional benefit of liberating the development team. By removing any internal preconceptions or bias, it offers developers a fresh perspective on how users interact with products, allowing them to be more creative and better able to reach their potential by continually adding new features and functionality to their software.
“I’m constantly asked how to incorporate the customer voice in testing,” says James. “For me, it’s about recruitment and team ethos. You’re not looking for hardcore test engineers or automation gurus. You’re looking for people with the aptitude to see different points of view. In terms of ethos: we’re not in engineering, we’re in UAT. We’re there for the users — guardians of the user experience. If I was to give anybody advice on making Agile UAT a success, it would be to think more like a user and less like an engineer.”
Applause’s global community of digital testing experts and end users has enabled James to bring that mindset to testing and QA, and helped him successfully shift left in developing Vodafone’s digital portfolio.
To learn more about key strategies that deliver value in software testing, attend the National Software Testing Conference in London on 23rd of July.
Edited by: Vaishnavi Nashte
For media enquiries, please contact vaishnavi.nashte@31media.co.uk
