Expleo announces its role in testing COVID-19 contact tracing app

Expleo, the technology partner for innovative companies, has announced details of its role in the development and launch of the HSE’s COVID-19 contact tracing app. Through quality assurance and software testing, the company was responsible for ensuring that the app was user-friendly, fast and reliable, which involved testing it to be able to handle one million downloads in an hour.

The app, which at the time of issue has been downloaded more than one million times, was developed by the HSE and Department of Health, with input from An Garda Síochána, Science Foundation Ireland and private partners from Ireland’s technology sector. It notifies users if they have been in close contact with someone with COVID-19, defining a close contact as someone who was within two metres of a confirmed case for 15 minutes or more. To find out more about the COVID Tracker app, or to download it, visit www.covidtracker.ie.

Expleo’s test team started work on the project on 17^th March 2020 and since that date, carried out approximately 3,400 individual software tests before the app’s launch. The work totalled 4,727 man-hours – the equivalent of almost 591 working days. A total of 26 Expleo employees were involved in the project, while a core team of 10 led and oversaw testing.

To ensure that a user’s surroundings, or large crowds, did not negatively impact the performance of the app – and to ensure the safety of the testers – testing was carried out in multiple simulated environments with multiple devices. Testing was later carried out on public transport to ensure that users only received notifications when appropriate.

Additional testing included:

• Performance testing – Expleo’s quality assurance and quality engineering teams carried out load testing on the app to ensure that large volumes of people could download it at the same time without causing it to crash.
• Exposure Notification Distance Testing – As devices have varying Bluetooth strengths, Expleo tested varying attenuation values that manage Bluetooth strength to maximise compliance with requirements.
• Graphical user interface (GUI) testing – Expleo tested the look and feel of the app, ensuring user-friendly navigation; the correct and reliable function of all buttons; and that all content and text matched requirements.
• Database Validation – Testers ensured that users’ anonymised data, gathered from downloads and registrations, was populated in the database without interfering with the anonymised data of other users.

Fran Thompson, CIO, HSE, said: “The COVID Tracker app is an essential addition to the HSE’s existing contact tracing work. For it to be effective, it needed to be easy to download and use, with highly responsive software that can cope with a very large user base. We chose Expleo due to their extensive experience in software testing and quality assurance. Their knowledge and commitment was invaluable in ensuring that the contact tracing app met all of the stringent targets and requirements we had set.”

Phil Codd, Managing Director for Ireland, Expleo, said: “The COVID-19 pandemic has had – and continues to have – a devastating impact on people and communities across Ireland. We therefore felt honoured that in recognition of our experience and expertise, we were invited by the HSE to join the fight against COVID-19 by carrying out software testing on one of the world’s first contact tracing apps.

“Our team went through a rigorous, lengthy process to ensure that the app is fast, reliable and easy to use. We are delighted to see such high volumes of people downloading it and hope that this will continue so that we can all work together to reduce the risk of COVID-19 infection for everyone.”

More about Irish Tech News and Business Showcase here

FYI the ROI for you is => Irish Tech News now gets over 1.5 million monthly views, and up to 900k monthly unique visitors, from over 160 countries. We have over 860,000 relevant followers on Twitter on our various accounts & were recently described as Ireland’s leading online tech news site and Ireland’s answer to TechCrunch, so we can offer you a good audience!

We’ve worked hard, grown our audience & now have corporate content partnerships with many global companies – who see the value of the audience they can reach through us.
Since introducing desktop notifications a short time ago, which notify readers directly in their browser of new articles being published, over 50,000 people have now signed up to receive them ensuring they are instantly kept up to date on all our latest content. Desktop notifications offer a unique method of serving content directly to verified readers and bypass the issue of content getting lost in people’s crowded news feeds.

Drop us a line if you want to be featured, guest post, suggest a possible interview, or just let us know what you would like to see more of in our future articles. We’re always open to new and interesting suggestions for informative and different articles. Contact us, by email, twitter or whatever social media works for you and hopefully we can share your story too and reach our global audience. We are agile, responsive, quick and talented, we look forward to working with you!

Irish Tech News

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at Simon@IrishTechNews.ie or on Twitter: @SimonCocking