Introducing Automation to Increase Speed and Quality for Global Supply Chain Management

The Client 

The client is a global organisation that provides end to end supply chain management services across the automotive, defence and utility sectors throughout more than 50 countries. With a combined turnover of more than $7 Billion, the Group employs a total workforce of close to 39,000 employees.

The client had already made attempts to move towards working within an agile methodology, but faced many obstacles along the way, as their testing process wasn’t enabling them to quickly respond to change. There was a misalignment between agile delivery and manual acceptance testing. The delays in manual regression test execution suites often caused software releases to be pushed back as defects were being identified too late, with little or no time allocated for turnaround of defect resolution within the delivery timeframes. This was ultimately leading to dis-satisfaction from their customers.

Roq’s Solution

Roq created a bespoke test automation framework which was developed in C# to align with the client’s in-house Microsoft tech stack. The page object model design pattern was used to promote reusability & maintainability, and Selenium WebDriver was incorporated into the framework to drive UI testing. The framework also supported cross-browser testing (Chrome, Firefox, IE and Edge), which led to a significant increase in test coverage. Additionally, the test results were integrated with their existing test management tool – Azure DevOps, which was used as a central dashboard for all test reporting, results and defect management.

Following a full review of the technology landscape and having built trust at the beginning of the project, Roq recommended a framework extension to functionally test the applications at a much lower level, moving away from the user interface and providing the capability to test at both API and database layers. This opened up the opportunity to use these lower-level components to set up and tear-down test data, pre and post-test execution, increased the stability of the tests and reduced execution time by 38%.

Moreover, Roq trained existing employees to manage and maintain the automation framework themselves; this included employees that had no previous software development or tooling experience. The client has gone on to use the framework to test other applications with relative ease.

The Outcome  

By increasing the speed of feedback, the test automation solution enabled the client to deliver features more frequently and with fewer defects. Ultimately, improving the user experience. Additional benefits and value adds from this service include:

• The automated regression pack saves significant time and money as it runs in just 5 hours verses the previous manual pack which took 4 man days (a reduction of 84%) – this dramatically changed the way the client worked freeing up resources, enabling them to complete other tasks such as exploratory testing and testing new features.

• The automation framework can support much quicker releases as it runs over night meaning changes can be validated on a daily basis. Previously changes were only validated 4 man days after a release.

• The framework enabled much faster speed to market by identifying defects earlier in the cycle, which meant defects can be raised, resolved and retested within the same agile sprint. This enabled features to be released much sooner than previously possible, increasing customer satisfaction.

• The automated tests resulted in significant increase in quality as they found browser specific bugs that would not have otherwise been discovered, so had a really positive customer impact, something that the client was keen to achieve.

If you’d like to find out more about how Roq can support your business, please email us at ask@roq.co.uk.