End-to-End Testing for the AI-Powered Meeting Platform

Apollo.ai is an intelligent all-in-one board & decision cloud that captures, manages, and shares knowledge before, during, and after meetings. The platform integrates AI technology directly into online meeting workflows to automate decision tracking and surface actionable insights for leadership teams.

Testing an AI-powered SaaS platform presents distinct challenges: AI-generated outputs are non-deterministic, user roles and access levels create complex permission matrices, and real-time collaboration features must hold up across devices, browsers, and concurrent sessions. QA Madness was brought in to build the testing process from scratch and ensure every release met production quality standards.

The client requested manual testing for the web application, emphasizing end-to-end testing in particular. SaaS platforms must be able to handle complex data, process multiple access levels correctly, and allow real-time collaboration. Together with Apollo.ai being a new platform developed from scratch, it determined the central challenges for quality assurance:

• To set up the proper testing process from scratch. The team had no QA engineer, and the project manager was in charge of testing.
• To provide sufficient test coverage, taking into account all the important features but without overloading the sprint with too many items on the checklist.
• To test the platform’s functionality for different user roles and access levels on different devices and browsers.
• To check AI features that are being developed to supplement and extend the platform’s basic functionality.
• To ensure the stability of every new app’s version and, whenever possible, prevent defects and gaps in logic at the planning stage.

After joining the project, the QA engineer started to get familiar with the platform to prepare test documentation, ensure sufficient coverage, and provide informative reports. Since the client requested end-to-end testing, it was decided to focus on the functionality and user interface on various devices and browsers.

The task was to set up the testing process from scratch. It entailed the following phases and activities:

1. Conducting exploratory testing. The QA engineer got to learn how the product works while reporting defects in parallel to learning about the functionality. The previous checks didn’t involve QA experts, so some bugs remained undetected.
2. Establishing an effective communication framework. It is critical to set up efficient reporting and feedback mechanisms between the QA engineer, developers, and Product Manager.
3. Preparing the checklist. It includes various aspects of functional, UI, compatibility, regression, and basic usability testing and is updated as new features are added.
4. Preparing bug reports. The QA engineer writes detailed bug reports to help the developers easily locate defects and their root causes.
5. Running change-related testing. Retesting is mandatory after each set of fixes to verify that the defects are no longer reproducible. The QA engineer also runs smoke and regression testing to confirm that the rest of the functionality hasn’t been affected by code changes.