Part 1: Core QA workflow

To design a framework integrated with CI/CD that aims to minimize user failures and maximize the
quality of the student's experience with our product, we need to focus on several key areas. These
areas include automated testing, continuous integration, and continuous delivery/deployment.

Automated Testing: Implementing automated tests that cover as much of your code as possible is
crucial to preventing bugs from reaching production. We can start by creating unit tests for each
function or module, and then build up to integration tests that cover the entire system. We can also
use tools like Selenium to test the user interface and ensure that it functions as expected.

I usually prefer using Python (Pytest as base test framework) based Page Object Model (POM)
frameworks, as they are easier to maintain and has high reusability. Also, we can integrate UI and
API / backend tests within the same framework going following this approach.

Continuous Integration: With continuous integration, we can ensure that each code change is tested
and integrated with the main codebase as soon as possible. This helps prevent integration issues and
ensures that bugs are caught early in the development process.

Continuous Delivery/Deployment: Continuous delivery/deployment enables we to quickly and

Monitoring: Monitoring is crucial to ensuring that your system is performing as expected and
catching issues before they become user-facing problems. We can use tools like New Relic or
Datadog to monitor system performance and alert we to issues.

Load Testing: Load testing is essential to ensuring that your system can handle spikes in user
engagement. We can use tools like JMeter or LoadRunner to simulate high levels of user traffic and
identify bottlenecks in your system.

DevOps Practices: Adopting DevOps practices such as infrastructure as code, configuration

User Feedback: Finally, it's essential to solicit feedback from your users and take their concerns and
suggestions into account. This can help us to identify issues that may not have been caught during
testing and improve the overall user experience. UAT performed in Staging environment, or at least
in Production (manual ‘touch and feel testing’) is also necessary for this stage. As our system
involves human focussed actions such as browser based (I’m not aware if the final product has a
client application, or purely browser based) viewing, video streaming etc. a manual feedback system
is a must to ensure the optimal customer experience, while reducing friction. Customer (students
etc.) hate any form of friction while learning technical subjects (talking from my own experience
while learning Udemy courses!)

In summary, to design a framework integrated with CI/CD that aims to minimize user failures and
maximize the quality of the student's experience with our product, we need to focus on automated
testing, continuous integration, continuous delivery/deployment, monitoring, load testing, DevOps
practices, and user feedback. By implementing these practices, we can ensure that our system is
reliable, scalable, and user-friendly.

Part 2: Reporting
To measure the effectiveness of the above system, we need to define metrics that align with your
goals and objectives. Here are some metrics we can use to measure the success of your system:

Bug Detection and Fix Rate: This metric measures the percentage of bugs detected and fixed before
they reach production. We can capture this metric by tracking the number of bugs found during
testing and the number of bugs found in production.

Build Success Rate: This metric measures the percentage of successful builds. We can capture this
metric by tracking the number of builds that complete without errors and the number of builds that
fail.

Deployment Frequency: This metric measures how often new code is deployed to production. We
can capture this metric by tracking the number of deployments per day/week/month.

Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR): This metric measures how long it takes to recover from a failure or
outage. We can capture this metric by tracking the time it takes to detect and resolve incidents.

User Satisfaction: This metric measures the satisfaction of users with your system. We can capture
this metric through user surveys, feedback forms, and social media monitoring.

System Availability: This metric measures the percentage of time your system is available and
functioning correctly. We can capture this metric by monitoring uptime and downtime, system
response time, and error rates.
Performance Metrics: This metric measures the performance of your system under different loads
and traffic levels. We can capture this metric by load testing your system and monitoring
performance metrics like response time, throughput, and error rates.

To capture these metrics, we can use a combination of monitoring tools, user feedback, and
analytics platforms. For example, we can use tools like New Relic or Datadog to monitor system
performance, Google Analytics to track user behaviour and satisfaction, and survey tools like
SurveyMonkey or Typeform to capture user feedback. We can also use custom dashboards and
reports to visualize and analyse your metrics and identify areas for improvement.

Workflow:

Code Review and Approval Process - (Associated steps: Peer review, unit testing, white box analysis)

Continuous Integration Server (CI) – (Build and run automated Unit tests)

Automated Test Framework – (Sanity testing, Regression, Performance and Integration tests)

V
Automated Deployment in Staging environment – (Manual testing effort, if required, for user touch
and feel)

User Acceptance Testing – (Focussed testing on new features of latest build, QA sign-off)

Automated Deployment in Production environment (Production Implementation Testing)

Monitoring and Alerting system – (Production issues monitoring and support, User feedback)

Reporting Dashboard – (Executive report containing brief test plan and defect summary, for all
stages)