Galmont Spotlight

Case Study: Zap2it, a Tribune Media Services Company
Media Innovator Turns to Galmont for QA Leadership

The Client
An entertainment news and listings service, Zap2it.com is a dynamic information network that delivers an ever-expanding world of entertainment choices to millions of users. Zap2it leverages the vast resources of its parent company Tribune Media Services in order to provide viewers with entertainment listings, news, reviews and photos that cover what’s on television, in the theaters and available for on-demand and mobile technologies.

In addition to the flagship portal, www.zap2it.com, Zap2it has hundreds of affiliated sites, including the entertainment sections of leading North American newspaper sites and cable system portals, where its services, content and advertising appear.

The Need
Zap2it has long been an innovator in delivering online content and services using the unique strength of Tribune Media Services data. The Zap2it technology team, which is highly skilled in delivering market-leading content products, releases several new applications yearly that are designed to improve the delivery and quality of entertainment content.

Despite their extensive release history and due to the rapid nature of its product release schedule, Zap2it had not established a comprehensive quality assurance and testing process prior to 2007. While testing processes were in place, the organization lacked a uniformed quality assurance methodology and test case repository that would allow its team to more rapidly identify and fix errors in order to further enhance product quality.

The Solution
Knowing that the hardworking Zap2it IT team did not have the bandwidth to focus on building a world-class quality assurance methodology, the Director of Technology for Zap2it, Greg Loose, leveraged his colleagues across the Tribune Company to identify the right quality assurance consulting support. Galmont Consulting, which has been providing quality and testing solutions to the Tribune Company for more than seven years, was the first name recommended by the Tribune network and the only one Loose decided to call.

The partnership began with Loose outlining his goal to Galmont: to create a library of test cases addressing all current Zap2it applications and to craft a comprehensive QA methodology that can be easily integrated into the existing organization’s structure and tools. “Our goal was to take another leap forward in the professionalism of our product releases by instituting standardized quality assurance methods,” explains Loose.

Galmont immediately paired Zap2it with one of its senior-most Quality Assurance Analysts, an expert who offered both a strong background in implementing customized quality assurance methodologies and over a decade of testing experience. In late February of 2007, the Galmont consultant joined the Zap2it IT team to begin assessing existing quality processes in order to build one, standardized method for quality assurance.

Working with the development team, management and those internal team members who were splitting QA duties among other development duties, the consultant conducted an audit of existing test scripts and reviewed testing processes. Based on what he learned of existing processes, and with guidance from Loose and other key Zap2it managers, the Galmont consultant began to develop a customized quality assurance methodology. The methodology the consultant chose as the framework for Zap2it’s quality assurance approach was flexible enough to accommodate the unique challenges of this small, highly productive group while stringent enough to create the much needed structure and safeguards required to catch and eliminate errors. In addition to developing the methodology, the Galmont consultant built a repository of test scripts for all Zap2it functionality.

The Results
At the end of the three-month assignment, Galmont had produced a library of test scripts and a comprehensive quality assurance manual for the client outlining the new methodology. The Galmont consultant completed the assignment by hosting a training to share the new methodology with the Zap2it team. Since the development and introduction of the new quality assurance methodology and the test script repository, Loose and the entire Zap2it team have seen large improvements in the quality of product releases.

“Galmont was able to come in, get up-to-speed rapidly and start producing deliverables,” explains Loose who was highly impressed with Galmont’s ability to analyze the business needs and immediately get to work. “Thanks to the Galmont support, we were able to quickly gain and implement the customized system Zap2it needs to achieve quality excellence all of the time.”

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