MEET THE TOWN OF MARANA
The Town of Marana is one of Arizona’s fastest-growing communities, with 44,000 residents living in close proximity to Arizona’s beautiful Tortolita Mountains. Marana boasts a thriving local economy, with local businesses operating in the fields of telecommunications, engineering, transportation and logistics. Marana also offers a high standard of public services and a welcoming atmosphere to new residents.
Marana’s local government employs approximately 350 workers. One of the local government departments constitutes of a local technology services team of six engineers, which provides essential tech solutions for Marana’s citizens and local businesses and makes their lives easier.
THE APPS
Marana’s Technology Services has so far furnished two citizen-facing apps, with a third one due to be deployed in late Fall of 2017.
The first is the Marana Events app, which aims to bring the people of the town closer together by keeping them updated about community activities and local events. The app also includes a business directory with links to local vendors at Marana events. The app is updated every three months with new features and is constantly updated with new content.
The second app available to Marana residents is the Project INA App. Project INA is a major highway construction project with ever-changing effects on traffic flow and access around the INA intersection. The app helps to minimize disruption to the lives of residents and businesses in the area from such a large project. To this end, residents can access traffic updates either by checking the app or by utilizing push notifications. The app also supports businesses impacted by the construction by providing a platform for them to reach potential customers.
ABOUT TESTFAIRY
TestFairy provides a solution for app developers to help them carry out testing and QA evaluation before releasing apps to the App-Store or Google Play. TestFairy’s ‘shake and report’ feature enables testers to quickly and easily share feedback about bugs and any issues with the developers of the app. When the app is being tested, the TestFairy SDK records videos, logs and important metrics to help the team identify, reproduce and fix bugs faster.
Marana’s local government Technology Services Development Team consists of just six people, four of which are involved in development. They need a fast, reliable, information-rich feedback tool that will not take up a lot of their developers’ time and help them understand each issue’s severity and priority quickly.
Marana had previously used a combination of manual app (APK) sideloading on Android devices and TestFlight, the iOS integrated test platform for Apple devices. The mere configuration and management of these test workflows required a large investment of the developers’ time, drawing them away from their primary task of coding. In addition, despite having these tools, Marana’s developers spent many hours just gathering feedback and understanding the root cause of each bug before they were able to begin to fix it.
Marana’s local government discovered the TestFairy SDK when one of their partner vendors used it during a joint app creation project. Marana’s team was impressed by the ease of usage and integration and adopted it for their own app development issues. When evaluating alternative testing tools it was clear to the team that TestFairy’s on-boarding process was by far the easiest. Once they were up and running there was very little maintenance and overhead required, which reduced the burden on the team’s developers and allowed them to dedicate more time to coding and bug-squashing.
Marana’s Technology Services team now use TestFairy to gather all their feedback and reports during the testing period. The team had established workflows to share feedback from TestFairy to Slack and JIRA for their developers’ attention. The ‘shake and report’ feature brings great ease of use for testers and encourages them to share their thoughts in an easy-to-review fashion.
Marana’s local government uses the screenshots and logs to identify and fix bugs quickly and easily, thus speeding-up their app-testing process and meeting app release deadlines. When trying to troubleshoot a particularly difficult bug or a problematic issue, they harness the powerful TestFairy video logs as well. TestFairy’s video reports enable Marana’s app developers to see what has happened within the app, giving insight into exactly how the user reached the point of needing to send feedback. With video reports, the developers can understand and fix bugs much faster than ever before.
With TestFairy, Marana is able to discover, track and fix bugs much faster, testing at scale in about 25% of the time it previously took for the same task. With the ability to channel TestFairy‘s feedback into Slack, which is also integrated with their JIRA suite, Marana’s local government departments can meet their app release deadlines with less effort. TestFairy’s ease of use and insight tools have directly facilitated Marana’s ability to launch three custom-built apps within 18 months. TestFairy's ease and insights directly facilitated Marana’s ability to launch three custom-built apps within 18 months.
Thanks to the intuitive TestFairy platform, Marana’s business analyst is able to access and explore feedback without needing support from the developers. This frees up the developers’ time for actually fixing bugs and creating new ones, making the entire technology services team more efficient.
TestFairy brings intuitive ease-of-use and powerful insights to Marana’s Technology Services Team. With the TestFairy SDK, Marana is able to redirect developer working hours into coding and speedy bug fixing rather than spending hours trying to reproduce and understand problems in their app. By freeing up developer hours and increasing their ability to locate, track and eliminate app issues, TestFairy enabled Marana to meet the app release deadlines and produce three custom-built apps in a very short time.
Thanks to the intuitive TestFairy platform, Marana’s business analyst is able to access and explore feedback without needing support from the developers. This frees up the developers’ time for actually fixing bugs and creating new ones, making the entire technology services team more efficient.
