How to test the Olympic internet broadcasting and sleep well

Hi! My name is Eugene Ponomarenko, and I am the founder of an outsourcing testing and QA agency «KVCHK». Our team works on a variety of different projects, but one of the most frequent industries we work with is broadcasting. The main challenge of testing broadcasting is that it is a specific product, where each functionality is built in its own way. Many things cannot be learned from courses or articles on the internet. For such specialties, testers with relevant skills are highly required..

Such products have many streams of different variations, which are built according to their own peculiarities. There are streams that contain advertising, and there are direct streams that do not. It is essential to understand what type of advertising it is and how to check it. There are types of videos that are stored on the server, and there are such streaming videos that cannot be downloaded. They are, so to speak, located on different servers, and the stream is collected from all servers immediately by pieces.

The ability to test broadcasting is a specific skill — you can learn to work and test it only if you have relevant experience and understanding of how it functions.

When it comes to internet broadcasts, especially long ones such as Eurovision or sports events, automated testing proves to be highly effective. The reason being that monitoring broadcasting can be too long for a person, and at some point, fatigue can set in leading to mistakes — a human factor that is unavoidable. Additionally, error rectification should be quick and timely, which is not always possible when a tester is conducting checkups.

Here is one of our cases:

We were responsible for the quality of Olympics internet broadcasting. Our task was to continuously monitor picture quality, voice and video sync, as well as timing. Of course, a person could sit and watch it by their own, but, firstly, it would take too long, and secondly, at some point, they may simply get tired, losing focus and making mistakes — yet again, a human factor. Our automated tester successfully automated the entire process. Still, that’s not all we did; we also created a bot where we received all reports and issues once in a while, helping us keep track of the process and ensure everything worked without issues.

In reality, we spent about a month automating the process, which allowed us to not sit around the clock monitoring the broadcast. Interestingly, automated tests helped us quickly identify a couple of issues and rectify them promptly.

I will be happy to answer your questions here.