New happenings at AvidTap

A quick update on what’s happening at AvidTap. We’re busy delivering tons of awesome features for our Saladworks launch next year. We’re moving to a new office location in the new year that’ll give us more space.

New Hire

We’ve made our latest hire to bring #6 onboard. When I decided that I was going to start a company, one of the things I wanted to do was to hire people better than me. For no other reason than being on a team of smart people will elevate my game. Back in university, I was really fortunate to share a house with many individuals who are better and smarter than me. I was also very fortunate to partner with many awesome people for AI course and CS real-time course. Being around that environment challenged me to do better and set my standards high.

We have an awesome team right now and I hope to make more great hires in the future. Everyone has their strong suit and complementary skills are needed to execute.

Testing

Within the past month we’ve made great strides to catch up on our testing infrastructure for AvidRegister. Due to initial time pressure we didn’t have any automated testing in place. Everything has been manual and adhoc. This is less and less sustainable if we want to keep the quality up. Our test matrix is very time consuming to go through since there’s testing needed for new AvidRegister version with new API version, old AvidRegister upgrade scenario and old AvidRegister version with new API.

On the other hand, our API project test coverage is great. I made sure to get that correct right off the bat. Large refactoring is easy because of tests in place. I can also simulate basically anything that the system might do easily.

For AvidRegister testing, I looked at a variety of things. I tested out monkeyrunner, the new Espresso framework, and Robotium. I settled on Robotium due to a combination of speed and maturity.

In order to enable end-to-end testing, I also re-factored common API calls in the AvidRegister web dashboard to be re-usable. What this means is that I can do things the same way that the web dashboard does, but do it inside a test.

Putting these things together the dev team now has the ability to fully automate end-to-end everything from logging in on AvidRegister on tablet to validation on web dashboard.

Getting this in place is crucial for the quality of the product and for efficiency to do more with less resources.