The Evolution and QA Challenges of the Home Service Order System: From Bronze to Diamond

The Tian'e Home Service order project has been developing for nearly six years since 2015. This article explores the business transformations, architectural upgrades, and the QA challenges that arose during each stage.

Order System Overview

The home‑service order system is part of the commercial side, responsible for order and service fulfillment management. The diagram below shows its position and main functional modules within the overall architecture.

The commercial side is divided into production, sales, and service. Production manages the onboarding and training of domestic workers, sales handles customer intent, payment, and contract signing, while service fulfillment arranges workers, monitors service progress, and processes remuneration.

Bronze to Diamond Roadmap

The order system has undergone several major transformations:

Bronze Stage (2015)

Orders were embedded in the Ice River system, providing basic entry and query functions—essentially a spreadsheet‑like interface marking the start of digital order management.

Silver Stage (2016)

The company focused on the maternity‑nanny (月嫂) business, creating the first dedicated order system (1.0) and later a more mature 2.0 version that supported online payment, refunds, and a fuller order‑service workflow.

Gold Stage (2017)

With the successful maternity‑nanny line, the company launched a separate nanny (保姆) order system to handle flexible bargaining logic, running in parallel with the existing system.

Platinum Stage (2018)

A three‑in‑one project unified the maternity‑nanny, childcare‑nanny, and nanny services into a single order platform, adding product, order core, customer, transaction, and settlement centers.

New product center to commodity‑ize services.

Unified order core supporting multiple business lines.

Customer center for centralized client data.

Transaction center linked to cash registers.

Settlement center handling payroll and rewards.

Diamond Stage (2019‑present)

The three‑in‑one system was split into a generic sales order system and a service fulfillment system, shortening the order‑to‑service chain and enabling rapid sales model changes.

The generic order system emphasizes flexibility and extensibility to support diverse sales scenarios.

Testing Challenges and Responses

Continuous iteration introduced several QA challenges:

System Integration Challenges

During the gold‑to‑platinum transition, the QA team faced extensive functional coverage, complex workflows, strong inter‑dependencies, and massive historical data migration.

Test Design: Involved early requirement analysis, mapping common and divergent functions across systems, and aligning test cases with the order lifecycle.

Identify test points for each lifecycle stage and assign case creation.

Link main and branch processes to cover all business lines and contract types.

Introduce specialized tests for contracts, payments, and payroll.

Test Execution: Four phases – main‑process validation, functional point execution (248 points), process‑link testing, and core‑function regression (19 critical points).

Efficiency Improvements: Developed an automated one‑click signing tool to reduce manual order creation from 4‑5 minutes to about 2 minutes.

The tool supports custom client, product, merchant, and service data, dramatically cutting manual data entry time.

Historical Data Compatibility

Migrating six databases (old and new) involved over 100 tables, 1,000+ fields, and more than 300,000 historical orders. QA validated data through three steps: schema comparison, Python‑driven field diff analysis, and business‑level verification in the new system.

New System Challenges

The generic order system demands rapid feature rollout, deep integration with many downstream systems, and high availability as a core platform. QA strategies include precise impact analysis, comprehensive knowledge bases, interface and DMQ testing, and focused regression on critical financial and workflow functions.

Future Outlook

As the home‑service business continues to grow online, the system must support fast‑changing sales strategies, maintain stability, and implement robust risk controls. QA will focus on high‑availability testing, precise test automation, and tool diversification to achieve the next “king” level of order management.