As an e-learning company that offers online learning platforms, content, and analytics, Learning Pool understands the importance of accuracy and a seamless product experience.

That’s why the company’s Quality Assurance (QA) team works diligently to test every single Learning Pool product and piece of software to ensure that it not only works the way it’s intended, but also exceeds customers’ requirements.  

It’s a responsibility that requires a lot of steps, details, and clear communication between teams—something that the Learning Pool QA team knew effective documentation could help with.

But, manually documenting their test results to share with the development team started to eat away at their time.

Between the hours spent logging test results, creating instructions for configuring test environments, and documenting steps for automation, the rapidly-growing team was spending an inordinate amount of time on documentation and not enough on what mattered most: actually testing and improving Learning Pool’s products.

Learning Pool’s manual documentation roadblocks

Time was a big factor, but it certainly wasn’t the only one. The team kept running into a number of hurdles when manually documenting their QA tests, including:

• It ate up too much time: As mentioned, time constraints topped the list. In order to resolve any issues discovered during the QA process, the team regularly creates and submits tickets to the development team so they can understand and fix bugs.

“You might average 30-50 steps for each ticket,” explains Daniel Owen, a Quality Assurance Analyst at Learning Pool. “One of the tests for our automation engineers was 145 steps. It could take an hour to document the steps for a ticket— and that’s without screenshots.”

• It lacked consistency: As the team and Learning Pool’s product line continued to grow (now featuring six different products), documentation became increasingly inconsistent. When the team expanded to 18 QA analysts, it was obvious that not everybody documented test outcomes in the same format or with the same level of detail. That made it more time-consuming for engineering to decipher the steps to recreate an issue.
  
• It missed information: Those different approaches to documentation were confusing enough, but Learning Pool also realized that handling these processes manually meant important information was often missed. For example, a tester might’ve experienced a bug when creating a new user. But, there are often numerous pages and routes to create a user within the system. If an engineer didn’t have the necessary information to repeat the process the exact same way, they were unable to identify or replicate the bug—let alone resolve it.

How Scribe helps Learning Pool save time and stress

Knowing that there had to be a better way, Learning Pool began using Scribe. With Scribe, the QA team clicks the “record” button before they begin their QA tests.

Scribe records every step that the QA team completes and automatically generates step-by-step guides (with screenshots). Scribe has been a crucial piece in addressing all of the headaches the QA team was experiencing and helps them:

• Save time with automatic documentation: Documentation is no longer an afterthought or a time-consuming activity on its own. Now, all the team needs to do is press “record” and proceed with their test. “With Scribe, we can test and write the documentation at the same time,” says Owen.

“Time savings is the most important thing for us. It’s been massive. I can record 150 steps in five minutes with Scribe.” Even further, the automation team has been able to use Scribe’s documentation to automate certain QA tests, saving even more time for the QA team.

• Ensure consistency with a standard process: Because Scribe is creating all of the documentation for Learning Pool’s tickets and user guides, every single documented process is formatted the exact same way. That makes the information far more digestible and understandable for all internal team members.
• Reduce miscommunications with enough detail and context: Scribe records every single step of the QA test and also automatically generates screenshots, which means engineers and developers aren’t missing out on the key information they need to do their jobs.

“One of the developers last week actually complimented our use of Scribe and how it’s far easier to look at steps on the Scribe document,” explains Rachel O’Donnell, a Quality Assurance Analyst at Learning Pool.

Beyond addressing the biggest challenges they were experiencing, the QA team experienced another benefit of using Scribe: It made it easier to transfer knowledge.

Because the company has expanded so rapidly, it’s no longer feasible for a specific tester to be an “expert” in a certain product—they all need to be able to test everything. Scribe’s thorough documentation gives everyone a single source of truth so that thorough product testing continues moving forward without relying on a sole person.

Eyes on the future at Learning Pool

Learning Pool’s QA team has already experienced the day-to-day advantages of using Scribe as part of their workflows.

And, on a broader scale, they know it’ll have a bigger impact for the entire company as a whole. When testing can be a bottleneck, Scribe has helped the QA team complete tests faster—which means the entire company is set up to get even more products to market.

Learning Pool plans to continue leveraging the power of automatic documentation on the QA team, while finding other ways to use it across the entire organization.

“Once we got our hands on it,” concludes Owen, “We saw the benefits for the rest of the company.”