Giving Clockwork Dog confidence in every release
What we delivered
Our ongoing QA partnership helps Clockwork Dog test its complex, hardware-integrated software, reduce release risks and deliver reliable immersive experiences.
Clockwork Dog is the creative technology company behind COGS, a desktop application used to power immersive experiences, from escape rooms and theatre productions to experiential marketing and live events.
COGS integrates with a wide range of hardware controllers to create complex, real-time interactive experiences. For its customers, reliability is essential. A software issue during a live experience can disrupt the entire production.
Keeping complex experiences running smoothly
With a small development team and a highly configurable product, Clockwork Dog needed a way to increase testing coverage without placing additional pressure on its developers.
The challenge wasn't simply finding software bugs. COGS needed to be tested across different hardware configurations, unexpected user behaviours and the conditions its customers encounter during live experiences.
With many of our users trusting our system to run their shows every day, there can be a huge impact in letting bugs slip into releases.
Clockwork Dog partnered with us to bring independent testing expertise into its development process, helping the team identify issues earlier and approach releases with greater confidence.
Building testing around the real-world experience
We began with a hands-on workshop at our Eastbourne office, where Clockwork Dog introduced our testers to COGS and the hardware it works with.
This gave us a practical understanding of the product and helped us develop a testing approach suited to its complexity.
We created initial test scripts to establish a baseline for functional testing and worked closely with Clockwork Dog to align our reporting and feedback with its existing development workflow.
A key part of the partnership was building a dedicated test rig that replicated the hardware and environments used by COGS customers.
This allowed us to explore how the software behaved in realistic conditions, including edge cases and unexpected interactions that might not be identified through conventional desktop testing.
They have taken the initiative to build a test harness that works well for their team and an issue reporting system that fits well with our development workflow.
Greater confidence with every release
What began as a trial has developed into an ongoing QA partnership. We now provide monthly testing support, maintaining test scripts and carrying out smoke, regression and exploratory testing as COGS continues to evolve.
Our testing and issue reporting fit into Clockwork Dog's development process, giving its team detailed feedback and helping identify issues before they reach customers.
We're very happy with the detail and rigour they bring to bug reports especially.
For Clockwork Dog, the partnership provides greater confidence in the quality of each release, reduces the risk of disruption during live experiences and gives its developers more time to focus on improving the product.
As COGS continues to develop, our testing approach can adapt alongside it, providing consistent QA support without the need to build a larger internal testing team.
‘Building a complex product, especially when interfacing with a variety of hardware, takes a lot of careful regression testing and in-depth exploratory testing with new features. Zoonou's attention to detail during the QA process gives us much more confidence in the code we're shipping to our customers.’
- Tom Dixon, Co-Founder and CTO at Clockwork Dog
Need reliable testing without growing your team?
Talk to us about outsourced QA that fits around your product and release cycle.
More articles
From script to screen: digital accessibility at the British Film Institute
Growing worlds together: our QA journey with Toca Boca
Making Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh's digital spaces as inclusive as its gardens