From monthly deploys to weekly releases with almost no customer-reported bugs

PlusTelecom came to NorthQA with a simple question: could we improve the way they tested and released software? Their process had been in place for years and the team had grown around it. It worked, in the sense that software did get shipped. It also produced a steady stream of bugs that reached customers, and nobody could say with confidence what was going to break next.

The situation

The release process looked like this. When a ticket was ready for testing, a developer checked it on their own machine. That local environment had whatever data, configuration and dependency versions that particular developer happened to have. It did not reflect production. Nothing did, because there was no staging environment at all.

Several developers worked this way in parallel. The only person doing anything that resembled QA was the project manager, who was also planning the work, talking to stakeholders and tracking delivery. Testing got whatever time was left.

Changes were batched into one deploy a month. A month of work going out in one push meant a month of untested interactions between features. When something broke, it was hard to tell which change caused it, and a fix had to wait for the next window or go out as an emergency patch.

The symptoms were what you would expect:

• A high volume of bugs discovered after release, many of them environment-specific
• No reliable way to reproduce a customer report, because no environment matched the customer's
• A project manager stretched between delivery and quality, doing neither as well as they wanted
• A monthly release that everyone braced for

What NorthQA did

We did not start with test cases. The root cause was that the team had no place to test, so the first job was to build one.

A staging environment that mirrors production. We worked with the team to stand up a staging environment configured to match production: the same services, the same integrations, representative data. For the first time, "it works on staging" meant something. A ticket was not done until it had been verified there.

A workflow the team could keep running without us. The point of a consulting engagement is to leave something behind. We designed a ticket flow with clear states: in development, ready for testing, tested on staging, ready for release. Each state had an owner and an exit condition. The workflow was deliberately light so that a growing team could adapt it rather than abandon it.

Testing and deployment that fit in days, not weeks. With a trustworthy environment in place, we built a quick test pass that ran against every candidate before it went out, and tightened the deployment steps so a release was a routine operation rather than a monthly event. Smaller, more frequent releases meant each one carried fewer changes and less risk.

QA that was not the project manager's side job. NorthQA took on the testing while the workflow bedded in, which gave the project manager their role back. Over the engagement we handed the day-to-day process to the team with the documentation and habits to run it.

The results

PlusTelecom now deploys three to four times a month instead of once. Customer-reported issues per month have gone from a regular stream to somewhere between zero and five.

The bigger change is what releases feel like. A deploy is no longer a month of work held together and pushed out with crossed fingers. It is a small batch of verified changes going out through a process everyone understands, and when something does slip through there is a staging environment to reproduce it in and a fix can ship within days.

What this engagement shows

Most teams that struggle with quality do not have a testing problem. They have an environment problem or a process problem, and testing harder on top of it does not help. PlusTelecom's improvement came from giving the team a place to test and a workflow that made testing a step rather than an afterthought. The same approach is what our QA consulting and training service is built around.