Procurement Software Development Made Easier: Notes from a QA Team

The procurement software development process is complex and comes with many challenges: balancing the high quality of the platform with competitive price, involving the right expertise, an ability to deal with a wide range of ongoing roadmap enhancements on several products or their variations, and so on.

We faced a variety of those challenges while working along with the development and product teams that create digital procurement platforms. So this article is based on our observations, analysis, and clients’ feedback. We’ll share some tips our QA team has learned through the years. Hopefully, you’ll discover something new and handy.

Best QA Practices in Procurement Software Development

This article isn’t a definitive guide to building a successful procurement platform. Probably, what we refer to as “success” would require more factors to consider. Also, some of the advice below may seem too obvious for readers with a good understanding of the industry. Nevertheless, even big companies don’t always have the processes set up perfectly, and what seems evident for some is more than helpful for others.

#1. Approving Platform Customizations

Let’s start with a recommendation that refers more to the business side of software development: a personal approach to clients. In practice, a project may not begin as custom procurement software development. When a platform is new and starts to build a client base, it usually offers a standard, unified functionality. After it gains a certain number of user companies, it can afford to become more client-oriented and start taking adjustment requests.

What does it have to do with QA? If there’s a Business Analyst on the team, they are likely to be the first to suggest this strategy and work closely with the tech teams to implement it. If you’re interested in more details about this specialist’s work, check out one of our earlier articles: What Is The Role of a Business Analyst in Quality Assurance?

#2. Building the Knowledge Base

Even using open-source procurement software development toolkits and systems, you’ll eventually come to the point when the original system remains a skeleton, and your platform becomes unique. Thus, community support won’t be enough, and you’ll need to ensure support for your own, your local community, aka the product team.

The knowledge base we’re talking about can include:

• software requirements specification;
• project wiki;
• detailed test cases;
• or any other source of truth.

It should be an explanation QA engineers can refer to when they need to verify a feature, and the rest of the team can use to learn how the product operates. Otherwise, all that’s left for the specialists is to guess how a particular feature should work.

Suppose the project wiki doesn’t exist, or no one updates it regularly. In that case, a QA engineer needs to request clarifications from a Business Analyst, Project Manager, etc., whenever they doubt something.

Software testers will need to have frequent discussions with developers regarding what seems to be the correct behaviors. It turns into a guessing game, where developers implement a feature the way it looks right for them, while QA engineers need to guess whether a particular behavior is a bug or a feature.

#3. Timely Team Adjustments

It’s only logical that businesses aim to grow. And when software is scaling – whether we’re talking about new features, extending the user base, or something else – the team needs to scale accordingly. In fact, it is one of the most common challenges an average procurement software development company faces.

Given the complex nature of such platforms, at a certain point, a procurement software company may need to create several QA teams for different parts of the project or different scope of tasks. When a system becomes more client-oriented, some clients may even require dedicated support.

Why is team scaling so challenging for companies? Several factors contribute to this.

• Firstly, getting the needed expertise can take time. It’s not always easy to find a suitable candidate. If a company decides to hire and educate beginners, it is better to start in advance.
• Secondly, if the scaling is rapid, this difficulty grows in geometrical progression.

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. The best way to make scaling the least stressful is to start planning it early. Often, involving outsourced QA can help access the needed expertise quite quickly and, as a rule, with fewer expenses than hiring in-house experts.

#4. Keeping Documentation in Order

We’ve mentioned documentation above, but this point refers to a bit different aspect of work. One of the ways to prepare test cases and bug reports is Google Sheets or a similar app. It is a frequent practice, but it can go out of control as the project progresses.

The more people join the bigger the work scope gets. Building a system that accounts for all the tasks and processes is critical. A company will need a bug-tracking tool eventually. If there’s already a business management system, its structure should be adjusted as the project scales. For example, you’ll need to have separate boards in Jira for platform variations (or clients, team members, etc.) or something of the kind.

It’s essential to remember that documentation doesn’t equal bureaucracy. Documentation is about keeping things in order. Eventually, it saves time and helps avoid confusion and chaos.

#5. Knowledge Maintenance

Knowledge sharing and perseverance should always be included in the risk diversification strategy. One of the biggest catastrophes for product teams is forming a situation (willingly or not) when there is one key knowledge bearer in the company. If this person leaves – temporarily or permanently, for a vacation or sick leave, – the work may be compromised.

It may sound a bit too dramatic, but that’s how it works in practice. Often, our QA engineers take the initiative to learn a different part of the project to understand better how the software works as a whole.

If a procurement software company works with multiple clients, it is likely that each of those clients gets a totally different platform from a QA engineer’s POV. The software can look identically on the front end but be very different inside.

Therefore, it is essential to establish a process where knowledge sharing will be something the team does per se. On the one hand, updating documentation may suffice. On the other hand, it’ll be beneficial to ensure that several people memorize important details about complex features.

#6. Increased Attention to Integrations

We keep mentioning that procurement software is complex, and there’s a reason for it. It’s essential to understand that such platforms only fulfill their purpose when working seamlessly with other tools. Cloud procurement software development must account for the connection to many systems that have migrated from paper to digital form (or function as digital twins).

Such integrations can include but aren’t limited to the following:

• accounting software;
• messaging services;
• ERP systems;
• online payment systems;
• marketing tools;
• and all kinds of vendors’ systems.

One of the strategies would be marking integration and API testing as high-priority since incorrect communication with other tools can make the entire system useless. Also, it entails close cooperation with the clients. If an end-user reports a problem, a QA team should request as detailed information as possible to reproduce the bug and help detect its root cause.

#7. Test Automation

We’ll keep this last point short. Whenever there is a large, complex system, there are prerequisites for automated testing. With AT, teams can accelerate the completion of repetitive tasks (in particular, smoke and regression testing), deal with large data sets quickly, and improve testing accuracy. Altogether, it shortens the testing cycle and reduces procurement software development costs in the long run.

To Sum Up

Best procurement software development practices are always based on common challenges, or rather overcoming them. We can’t predict all the difficulties a product team can face. Still, we hope that some insights from our projects will turn out to be useful for your team. And don’t forget that procurement management software development is always easier with a reliable QA team by your side 😉