Testing Strategies and Architecture for Live‑Streaming Platform Platformization

Author: Cao Qiaohui

With the rise of influencer‑driven live commerce, live streaming has become a new media form that reshapes consumption, and during the pandemic it delivered tangible results; Zhezhuan launched an antiques live‑stream in June last year and moved to a platformized live‑streaming model in June this year, redefining the second‑hand trading space.

For QA staff, the key questions are how to understand the capabilities before and after platformization and how to adjust testing focus accordingly.

The original live‑streaming business used a single database and a two‑layer logic architecture: the lower layer leveraged Tencent Cloud live and IM services to provide basic live‑streaming functions, while the upper layer delivered specific business logic for antiques and mobile e‑commerce.

The business is fast‑paced and lightweight, so testing emphasizes business flow, risk assessment, and providing improvement suggestions to enhance user experience.

Testing directions:

1. Business testing – functional, compatibility, and code‑coverage tests focus on upper‑level features to get the business running quickly.

2. Project control – daily stand‑ups led by QA to monitor schedule and resource conflicts, virtual war rooms for coordination, and requirement‑tracking matrices to support stand‑up meetings.

As the business diversifies, platformization becomes essential: functions must be modular and abstracted to support multiple categories (phones, antiques, luxury goods) and scenarios (entertainment, e‑commerce), enabling low‑cost, rapid expansion of personalized features.

Architecture solution: Split business modules and isolate data so that services can be reused via APIs or MQ. The common live‑streaming capabilities are extracted into an independent platform that supports various verticals, demanding higher stability and scalability. Compared with business‑level testing, platform testing requires full‑process quality control.

Platform characteristics: generic, configurable, extensible.

Platform testing directions:

1. Interface testing – validate and assert API responses.

2. Pre‑data construction – use code to generate test data efficiently.

3. Performance testing – measure live‑stream power consumption, traffic usage, concurrent user load, and application response speed.

4. Project control – full‑process oversight from upstream to downstream, including requiring product specification documents, analyzing requirement impact, fostering team‑wide project control, and conducting technical design reviews before development.

Although platform testing may lack the novelty of rich business scenarios, shifting from business‑driven to platform‑driven testing creates a closed loop that ensures quality; QA must stay enthusiastic about each requirement, as testing ultimately aims to improve delivery efficiency and quality.

Past articles and resources (links) are listed for further reading.