House Party, Inc. has been utilizing TOMOS for over a year and is one of our first and longest lasting clients. We recently interviewed Mark Fogarty, VP of Technology for House Party about his team’s experience with TOMOS. They are a distributed team of business analysts and developers and outsource their testing to RTTS.

House Party is an in-house marketing and customer activation program. We contract with our clients to run customer-hosted marketing events around our clients’ products, typically running 1,000-5,000 of these events, known as “House Parties,” on the same date. We are active in a number of verticals, including consumer packaged goods, automobiles and television. Each party is centered on allowing the customer to experience a product. A client’s campaign with us consists of thousands of these parties that are all happening at the time same in individual people’s houses.

Our industry is a very fast moving one. We have to be able to adapt, add new functionality and adjust our strategies and approaches quickly. That means that we are constantly making modifications and adjustments on our website, which is our primary interface with customers. It is important that site works just right when we launch. Otherwise it makes us look bad, alienates customers and burns up lots of helpdesk support time.

Using TOMOS before we put a new release out to production gives us a much clearer release every time we turn out a new one, which we do a lot. It is hard to stay coordinated and having TOMOS’ insight increases the quality of our site and our business. It gives us a lot more confidence to make the changes that we do without worrying there will be something we didn’t catch.

We are currently using TOMOS to manage requirements and track defects and our testing team adds new test cases to the system. We undergo test execution biweekly, running automated scripts and then updating TOMOS to reflect the status of those executions. As a project manager, I use TOMOS to get test results and share them with my development team so that we know what issues we need to address. I think the most useful aspect of TOMOS is the ability to see the test steps and accompanying results. It gives me a better insight into testing.

With TOMOS, I can look at the individual test suites that are being run, the test steps that are failing and the webpage page the failure is on, as well as what stage in the process is giving an error. I can even link the failed step back to my internal web server logs to track the session and determine the cause of the problem.

I can always look at TOMOS to see the very latest information, giving me detail and depth into what’s going on. Spreadsheets are great but as soon as they are sent, things change. Plus, TOMOS is real-time and available to me whenever I want to look at it. All in all, TOMOS gives me a better, more detailed and more-real time view into the results of the testing effort. We see it as a huge benefit.

Founded in 2005, House Party (www.houseparty.com) is a leading consumer activation and experiential marketing services company that engages thousands of qualified consumer advocates who host in-home parties featuring a brand, product or element of entertainment programming. Managed via a proprietary, customized online community space for each brand event, consumers engage both in home and online to explore and promote brands they love. Headquartered in Irvington, NY, House Party works with such industries as consumer packaged goods, food & beverage, television, theatrical releases, consumer electronics, pharmaceutical, toys & games and automotive. Current clients include TNT, Ford, Kraft, Microsoft and P&G.