Introduction

The digital health industry is transforming neuroscience through digital biomarkers. These digital biomarkers are establishing a new standard for both pharmacological research and clinical practice. 

This week we talk about our manual software testing services to get a closer look at the internal process of a digital health platform project. 

What is a digital health platform?

A digital health platform offers users a new approach to rapidly transferring health information through cloud services. 

What are digital biomarkers? 

A digital health platform that focuses on digital biomarkers creates digital tools such as smartphones and wearable devices to measure and collect health information in order to help and improve research for new treatments in neuroscience. A digital biomarker can measure patient symptoms precisely and objectively over long periods of time. 

Digital Biomarkers are currently applied in multiple sclerosis and have potential application in many diseases in neuroscience as well as rare diseases.

Digital Biomarkers offer several unprecedented benefits:

  • Digital Biomarkers minimize bias associated with pattern recognition
  • Modern consumer devices (smartphones and wearables) can collect reliably and continuously accurate and objective data
  • Digital Biomarkers are a cost-effective way to collect large amounts of data in a consistent manner
  • Recent FDA and EMA guidelines endorse Digital Biomarkers as innovative endpoints

What are the specifics of this project? 

The specifics of this project require complete testing for cloud, mobile, and web platforms. We are also gradually preparing to switch towards automation testing. 

What does a tester do on a digital biomarker project?

It is very similar to other manual QA roles. Our team is involved in the development and test phase of the project.

Some of the tasks our testers have are: 

  • Understanding the architecture of the tested product. 
  • Planning out the testing strategy in order to execute tests and find hidden issues.
  • Analyzing the pros & cons of the specific plan, as well as the risks linked to each of the components and interfaces in the product.
  • Staying up to date with the technical aspects of the project infrastructure (e.g. browsers, databases, languages, etc)
  • Analyzing, logging issues, and providing appropriate feedback.

The tester also has to partake in several daily calls essential for any Agile project. 

What’s the team composition and organization? 

Because of the complexity of the project, the teams are structured as:

  • One Requirement Owner
  • One Product Manager
  • One Product Owner
  • One Web&Cloud BA
  • One Mobile&Services BA
  • One UX/UI Designer
  • One SD Manager
  • One BE Team
  • One FE Team
  • One Q&A Team
  • One Data Team

What are the testing tools used? 

Starting from the basics, we create test cases in TestRail, and for bug tracking and reporting, we use Jira. To assign tasks and share documentation, we use Confluence. For localization and translation management, we use Lokalise. 

Next on, we use Postman for API testing. We use Developer Tools to validate features for web testing, and for mobile testing, we use XCode for iOS tests.

What are the challenges for this project? 

1. Testing the Complete Application (Web, Mobile, and Cloud)

Testing the complete application is a challenge itself because of the difficulty of creating all possible execution environments of the system. 

2. Understanding the Requirements

Requirements serve as a foundation for test plans and project plans, and understanding them sets the working base of a project.  Sometimes the requirements are not sufficiently clear, or simply, they are not enough. To better understand the requirements or the lack of, you should ask yourself the following questions:

  • What is it?
  • What does it do?
  • What does it process?
  • What does it depend upon?
  • How will it be used?

The following questions can be adapted and applied as you need. 
Regarding all these characteristics, we can confidently say that testing is a vital part of the software development life cycle. 


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