Testing of a Video Compression & Conversion Software for a leading video encoding company

Executive Summary

Our customer is a global leader for encoding and compression applications, provides hardware and software solutions that enable users to easily and affordably compress, manage and deliver quality video over the Internet and to CDs, DVDs, mobile devices and other formats. The company also produces quality tools for publishing and managing user-generated content.

Our customer's latest software application is an industry-leading video encoding tool which is used to efficiently re-purpose video content for web, CD or DVD applications. This can be achieved by compressing the audio/video file, changing the audio/video codec, changing the supported format, editing the video display with effects.

ennovate was engaged for complete product QA and testing. Since the product development followed the Agile model, ennovate offered shorter and frequent regression cycles for the product through VBA, Shell scripting and Froglogic Squich/Qt automation tool.

The Customer

• Our customer has helped to foster the development of online video with seminal innovations, such as video codecs, encoding application, browser-based video publishing platform for user-generated content, an all-in-one hosted service that serves a complete Internet video publishing solution for video professionals and small to medium sized businesses

The Challenge

• Scope of this project is to validate the application for the changes and new features which have been added to its previous release. So the important aspect was to validate that all the existing features as well as the new features are shipped without defects in the release

The Solution

• Test Case suite creation & maintenance to cover the complete set of functionality of the product
• Defect logging, tracking & verification of the same
• Functional & Regression Testing to test the product. As the product development was based on Agile Methodology, there was more of build to build regression testing to be done
• As a part of Performance Testing; video compression timings for different filter, compression formats and codec; matrices were generated which helped in comparing the changes in the performance timings
• Automation tool Froglogic Squish 3.0 was used with Python language to prepare an ‘Automation Suite’ for Regression Testing and get the timings for performance comparison and other GUI functionalities. VBA on Windows platform & Shell Script on Mac platform were used for automation to calculate the compression time/size of the output files which can be run overnight

The Technology

• Test Platforms: Windows OS & Machintosh OS X
• Automation Tools: Froglogic Squish/Qt for GUI automation, VB for applications & Shell scripting
• Others Tools: Test Track Pro

The Benefit

• The core feature of application were identified and automated for regression test. This helped in accomplishing quicker regression cycles and with least modification requirement for Automation suits which in turn had been cost effective and time saving