The Customer
Advanced Metrics
The Business Challenge
As Advanced Metrics grew, they offered multiple applications to help clients manage mental health and social services—supporting professionals like doctors, social workers, and educators. These tools handled appointment scheduling, care documentation for ongoing evaluations, and reporting to authorities to demonstrate outcomes and secure funding.
These applications had been in use for decades and were in need of modernization. Each service had its own dedicated application, even though they shared common high-level functionalities such as generating continuous evaluation tools, producing reports, and managing calendars for attendants and attendees, among others.
To modernize their legacy systems, they developed a new, highly configurable application—Qualo—designed to support diverse care needs while preserving the proven business core. Qualo would consolidate existing applications, migrating clients individually and targeting both current and new customers seeking metrics for social and mental care services. With a small development team and no QA process in place, they turned to Improving for experienced testers to establish and maintain quality assurance, supplementing their existing QA leadership.
Our Solution
Improving contributed to the implementation of the quality assurance process by supporting the new test leadership. Simultaneously, they provided guidance on process development and delivered presentations to the developer team, who were unfamiliar with QA procedures. These sessions covered how to create requirements, develop acceptance criteria, and identify positive, negative, and alternative business flow scenarios. The focus was on designing these scenarios proactively, rather than waiting for QA feedback after coding was completed and entering the testing phase.
We ensured the development team clearly understood that we were building a new, all-purpose application—not just a rework of the existing systems.
The Business Benefits
Established a robust QA process tailored to Advance Metrics’ specific needs.
Fostered a quality-first mindset across all stakeholders, emphasizing the importance of designing for quality from the outset and encouraging cross-functional involvement—from management to business and development teams.
Earned the client’s trust to such an extent that, even after pausing QA support due to budget constraints, they remained in contact for a year to re-engage experienced Improving QA engineers. These testers had previously identified critical design flaws before production, helping the client avoid costly issues and protect their reputation.
Technologies and Methodologies Used
The client’s management team had already established the use of agile methodologies and DevOps tools throughout their processes.
Because they hired experienced QA engineers, only the newly onboarded developers required training in the relevant methodologies and implementation tools.
Partnerships
Since the launch of Qualo, Advance Metrics has made significant progress. Together, Advance Metrics and Improving learned to not only build and test new applications that modernize existing processes but also to validate client data migrations—thoroughly testing scripts in QA before production.
Over time, the size of the Improving team has flexibly scaled up or down based on Advance Metrics’ evolving needs and available resources.
Lessons Learned
At one point, Advance Metrics released a high volume of complex features in short sprints, which strained testing capacity. Bugs began appearing in production before proper QA could be completed, prompting the team to recognize the critical need for dedicated testing time.
During this period, another contractor was brought in for QA support. However, under delivery pressure, they approved features without adequate testing or risk analysis. This led to developers testing in production and created uncertainty around both product quality and functionality. Eventually, Advance Metrics ended that engagement and returned to Improving for reliable QA support.
While there were attempts to expand with automated testers, developers, and DevOps services, those efforts didn’t sustain over time and were phased out due to various challenges.
Conclusion
Advance Metrics has shown resilience despite slower-than-expected growth and is composed of genuinely kind, dedicated people. While the partnership with Improving hasn’t been without challenges, it has consistently been grounded in mutual respect, professionalism, and a strong human connection. We expect to keep collaborating with their growth and success.
