Pursuit Software’s initial assessment based on in-person interviews as well as independent observation of the testing process showed that:

Majority of the issues were resulting from a change in the development approach to use REST APIs interacting with a NoSQL backend to drive the portal functionality, compared to the robust and proven mechanism involving direct interaction with the system backend using Java and a relational database (MS-SQL).

A manual testing approach had been used prior to the transition to validate data insertion and response for the relative and absolute time interval combinations. However, insufficient training for the REST API calls and NoSQL database made it difficult to translate the existing test cases to the new environment, and to validate the API responses vis-à-vis the backend data.

Pursuit worked closely with the client’s testing team to:

Implement best practices for REST API testing, including providing support to implement a standard REST API testing tool to ensure a smooth transition to improve test execution in the new environment.

Implement basic test automation to help extend the testing approach to cover additional combinations of time intervals and corner cases which had not been addressed previously.