The Challenge: Cumbersome Testing Procedures
A leading national retailer was developing a new, mission-critical, in-store application. Product reliability and stability were crucial, and the target deployment date was fast approaching. The retailer needed assurance that, given the time constraints, their testing efforts would be adequate to meet their quality requirements. The retailer sought to optimize its application of testing throughout the software development lifecycle. The current test process was cumbersome, but it was unclear how to make the process more efficient without sacrificing effectiveness.
Sophelle’s Assessment
Through an assessment of their quality assurance process and testing cycle, Sophelle found that the retailer’s manual approach to functional and user interface testing was exhausting an inordinate amount of available testing resources. Weekly code updates required nearly 80 man-hours of regression testing to ensure proper coverage. In addition to being time-consuming, regression testing involved many mundane and repetitive tasks.
Sophelle concluded that the automation of the functional and user interface testing could enhance the effectiveness of the testing process and accelerate the overall development cycle. Additionally, automated testing would allow for more consistent defect reporting.
Solution
Using Sophelle’s advanced approach to automated testing, a sound test plan for implementation was established clearly outlining testing segments to be automated. Sophelle specifically identified several hundred test cases and their expected results according to application requirements.
Scripting was performed remotely to fully leverage Sophelle’s investment in testing infrastructure and to minimize associated overhead. Sophelle’s experienced test engineers used a consistent standard for test case and script creation to ensure that all testers could quickly and easily understand the nature and details of every script.
Result
Sophelle delivered a set of reusable scripts that automated 100% of the functional and user interface test effort. Regression test time was dramatically reduced.
In only three months, the regression test cycle that once took nearly 80 hours of manual testing could be conducted in under 4 hours at any time of day without human intervention. Relieved of many repetitive tasks associated with regression testing, manual testers focused on achieving deeper levels of product testing and defect resolution.
In addition to accelerating the testing process, the results of the automated tests were captured in reports that clearly communicated defect details and application status to both engineers and management.
Sophelle’s automated testing was not only beneficial for the current development project, but its implementation served as a foundation for an improved development lifecycle to be used for future initiatives.
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