Industry
Technology
Services
Customer’s Location
New York, NY, the USA
About the Project
Smartrr is a premium subscription services tool for DTC Shopify brands designed with the end customer in mind. It is fully integrated into Shopify’s platform and consists of three integral parts: the customer’s and vendor’s interfaces, auxiliary integration, and analytics tools. The platform provides a comprehensive membership experience that allows customers to focus on exclusive offers and additional discounts while businesses can focus on their growth journey without getting bogged down by spreadsheets leveraging the power of real-time analytics and reporting.
The tool also offers a wide range of native loyalty features for customers, including rewards and referrals, as well as tools for a seamless integration of commerce and community involving influencers and creators into the process. Smartrr’s approach is based on the end customer and brand connection provided by smart retention, mobile-first design, email & SMS for subscription management combined with customer support service and ongoing onboarding.
The Challenge
ELITEX started collaborating with Smartrr at the very early stages of the development when the startup was around 6 months old. At this phase, Smartrr was a small but fast-growing and promising team. The initial reason for contacting ELITEX was to replenish the startup with the necessary human resources, as the Smartrr team was looking for additional technical expertise. Firstly, Smartrr was looking for QA specialists since, at that time, their team did not include any. At this stage, the goal was to create a quality assurance team and establish testing processes from scratch.
Furthermore, as the robust QA team was built, it became evident that the existing team of developers also needed to be augmented. As Smartrr successfully expanded and grew, the company also decided to find additional front and back-end developers, as well as DevOps professionals, to meet the growing demands of the business.
As the work on the project progressed, the specific areas where technical changes were needed also became apparent. The original monolithic architecture had optimization and performance issues; specific security vulnerabilities were also detected. Simultaneously, the automation of QA processes, as well as the improvement of scalability, stability, and availability of the product, became a high priority during the following stages of collaboration.
The Solution
The partnership between Smartrr and ELITEX started by involving QA specialists. Initially, the team of 2 QA engineers was later expanded by the DevOps engineer, back-end and front-end developers, two additional QA specialists, the project manager, and tech support, reaching a total of 9 specialists fully integrated into the in-house team immersed into the project.
In terms of quality assurance, the Smartrr in-house team did not include a single in-house specialist, so the ELITEX engineers were working on every nuance from scratch while the product had already been released. At the outset, the documentation system was created. After thoroughly exploring the product, the QA team developed detailed test cases for the platform's both vendor and customer sides.
Right after the initial preparations and manual testing, the QA team proceeded with new features testing cases, regression/feature analysis, as well as improvement of the existing user experience, and planning of automation of QA processes. The collaboration between Smartrr and ELITEX was based on the principles of honesty and transparency, so the technical specialists had free hands to bring their vision to life.
Regarding QA automation, the collaboration continues, and our team leverages the power of Typescript (Playwright framework) to create automated QA testing to streamline and expedite the overall testing process. Currently, the QA team is working on autotests, reducing the regression time and freeing up the time for feature testing.
They offer us QA services, and their QA team is phenomenal. We have biweekly releases, but we very rarely find unknown bugs due to the competency of their team.
In terms of the platform’s infrastructure and architecture, the ELITEX developers adopted several decisions to improve the project’s performance and provide the end customer with a better user journey:
- The monolith structure of the platform was broken into two parts, allowing to avoid overload of the backend, which became way more responsive;
- We developed a set of scripts that helped to migrate from Amazon’s SQS to GCP pub/sub, which improved the overall stability of the platform and prevented the loss of data;
- Additionally, the centralized logging system, tagging, and monitoring dashboards were created as a matter of overall performance improvement.
ELITEX has an excellent screening process for the new positions available we might have. They always do a very extensive technical screening so that, when I get on the phone with the candidates, there’s already a high level of confidence that they have the skillsets that we need. This process helps us shorten the time it takes to onboard new resources because our initial conversations with the candidates revolve around finding out if they’re the right fit for us instead of focusing on their experience and skills.
The very essence of our partnership lies in building strong links between Smartrr and ELITEX team, which is working on the project. Expanding the collaboration from a few QA specialists to an entire development team has brought a holistic approach to development, significantly improving the final product. A shared vision of the teams empowered the core house crew to focus on strategic initiatives and business objectives, propelling the company toward its long-term goals.
The result
Although Smartrr is a relatively young company, the success the team has achieved in a few years is astounding. Being one of the most promising subscription e-commerce apps on the market recently, Smartrr has already gained deserved recognition. And ELITEX is proud to be a part of the project's overall success.
ELITEX’s involvement has been critical for the success of our company. They’ve helped us grow significantly, and we’ve increased our size by fivefold in less than a year.
As of today, the partnership between ELITEX and Smartrr is not over, and both parties have further plans to expand the collaboration. Despite achieving the initial goals and expectations, which sometimes were even exceeded, the Smartrr team still has plenty of ideas to be implemented in their platform, and, for its part, the ELITEX team is ready to do everything we can to ensure the future success of the ongoing collaboration.
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