Clinovera
First Line Software is a premier provider of software engineering, software enablement, and digital transformation services. Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the global staff of 450 technical experts serve clients across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
PROJECT SUMMARY
Our client is the global leader in tech-enabled creative production and procurement. Working with some of the top restaurant franchise brands in North America, they utilize an e-commerce platform to enable their customers to order localized marketing materials. The platform also provided digital asset management, customizable reporting, and analytic dashboards. As the platform grew so did their test case load and regression testing needs. First Line Software was brought on board to complete an audit of their current practices and implement QA automation where possible.
CHALLENGE
With any platform, it has to evolve to customers’ needs and desires. It has to also respond to user experience issues and remain a stable, enjoyable, and productive platform. This is no different for our client. In fact, they had an incredible team of developers who moved very fast. This is great for the previously stated goals, however, it does carry some downside. At the time First Line Software was brought in, the client had a current load of 2,000 test cases and it was increasing quickly. This brings a number of challenges with it.
- With each release, regression testing loads increase requiring time to run through the tests, gather results, and assimilate data. The duration of each manual regression iteration was an average of 3-5 weeks for each implementation for our client.
- With the growing testing loads (functional, integration, regression testing, and test design), their testing budget was growing more than 15% annually.
Having more than 2000 test cases currently and planning to scale their business cost was certainly a concern. Their manual testing team couldn’t afford to do this without increasing the time of release and testing. Also, their test model was growing with every release. Consequently, the costs of regression testing increased with each new update and grew every year resulting in the growth of the testing budget.
RESULTS
Following an extensive audit of their QA team, processes, and procedures, First Line Software recommended and implemented an integrated automated testing framework to alleviate some of
the noted challenges and allow for scaling of their business. Some of the primary results are noted.
- The testing budget of 15% yearly growth was eliminated. This is even with the added costs of QA automation implementation.
- Regression testing cycles were diminished from 3-5 weeks to 1 week while the number of regression test cases was increased from 2000 to 6000 test cases.
- Implemented a Behavior-driven Testing approach and Selenium framework helped to reduce the cost of support automation tests by 50%. It afforded all members of the development teams to work with automation tests without any special education.
- The client had previously purchased a licensed tool (Ranorex) only to find out it was expensive and couldn’t scale to growth needs. So First Line Software recommended Selenium as an open-source tool that could meet the needs and scale of the growth of the application.