Hotstar

Our cricket frenzy is unmatchable, even if we aren't on the winning end.

We value quality live sports. If you love cricket, you know what this is about. Cricket isn't just a sport you view, it's an experience you live through. And nothing can get more frustrating than this experience going wrong.

Imagine you're on your way back from work and logging into a sports OTT app to see the match. The video quality keeps fluctuating. The app drains your phone's battery, your phone heats up, and now you're left with slow internet and an almost dying phone. You've missed the match, and your smartphone won't even let you Google the score.

Now multiply that across every device Hotstar runs on Android phones, iOS, iPads, tablets, XBOX, PS4, Samsung TV, LG TV, Fire Stick, Google Chromecast, Apple TV, web app, and setup boxes from different providers. That's not a single platform to test. That's a small army of platforms, each with its own quirks, each capable of ruining the experience for millions in real-time.

When we looked under the hood, the testing challenges went deeper than device fragmentation. Ad-hoc requests were flying in constantly sanity tasks, device manager executions, Rocky executions with no system to triage them. There was no process setup. Tasks weren't organized or sorted by priority. The team was firefighting instead of testing.

Hotstar needed more than extra hands. They needed someone to take ownership of platforms, run testing threads independently, follow severity and priority definitions religiously, maintain documentation, and send structured daily and weekly status and bug reports. They needed testers who understood debugging, who could use Charles Proxy to log issues, pull ADB logcat logs for bug reporting, and be sharp enough to hand developers everything they needed to fix a bug fast.

We built a brilliant team of eight testers who split themselves into three teams.While one team travelled more than 50 kms in harsh Bangalore traffic to test these apps in real-world conditions, another got directly in touch with viewers who had bad experiences — connecting through Hangouts with users

who had rated the apps poorly. The third team ran multiple scenarios to capture what creates a satisfactory experience for users.But the real transformation happened in how we restructured the chaos. We assessed every ad-hoc request in terms of risk, complexity, and urgency no more random firefighting. We streamlined the entire QA process. We defined criticality and priority for every task so nothing important got buried. We brought in a strong automation culture that gave the team confidence in their release cycles. And we built feedback loops that kept improving product quality sprint after sprint.

Our focus was clear: own the new releases and maintenance, make sure nothing breaks in production for both the existing and new architecture. E2E testing, functional testing, regression, mobile app testing across Android and iOS, and web app testing all covered with the kind of ownership Hotstar demanded.

Today, platforms like Hotstar have enabled millions of people to view cricket at a click away. India's cricket frenzy has remained and will remain, despite our wins and losses. Here's wishing Hotstar the heartiest congratulations. Kudos to the entire team for making this possible. We know a 25.3 million concurrent viewership is just the beginning for them.