The federal government of Canada, in partnership with Canadian Digital Service (CDS), rolled out COVID Alert, a mobile application developed to help notify Canadians of possible COVID-19 exposures before any symptoms appear.
The role of OXD’s team, in part with a larger team, was helping the government confront the COVID crisis with automated testing and robust and timely quality assurance for a mission critical citizen application.
As part of the OXD team’s inclusive end-to-end testing process, they started with manual testing on virtual devices. This was crucial to testing in the early stages due to having to follow strict mobile app and security testing guidelines imposed by both Google and Apple stores. Some of these included:
- Functional testing
- Compatibility testing
- Performance testing
- Automation strategy (framework selection and platform considerations)
The broader testing team also performed user experience (UX), accessibility, and security testing.
The app was tested on both personal and purchased mobile phones with various operating systems. Performance testing was especially important to ensure the app was able to handle the potential volume of users. Testing was based on a simultaneous volume of approximately 500 people all using the mobile app at once—an estimated projection from the app development team. Over 20,000 scenarios were run over a 15 minute timeframe by the OXD QA team.
The OXD team was proud to be part of this national initiative. To help support COVID-19 transmission awareness, visit the Government of Canada website to learn more about how the app works, or to download the COVID Alert app to your device.
Want to learn more about our testing processes? Contact us to learn how OXD can support testing services for your website or mobile application.