Online retailer chooses Roq for Major Oracle Implementation

The Client 

Our client is the United Kingdom’s leading online and home shopping retailer, with revenues of around £2 billion. It is a well-established business, having been in existence for over 100 years, amassing over 5 million active customers across its various business units.

The existing legacy systems, currently used to maintain and create new product data, were:

• no longer able to quickly respond to the increasing business demands for available products to be ‘On Sale’ through their various market channels

• difficult to access and maintain within key departments, such as Buying and Merchandising.

The client needed a solution to integrate with existing systems to get a product on sale, improve stock management and support inventory cost optimisation.

Roq’s Solution

The solution implemented was Oracle PIM (Product Information Management). The Oracle PIM Data Hub is an enterprise data management solution. This enables customers to centralise all product information from many different systems, creating a single view of product information to all functional departments.

Due to the complexity of the solution, the client needed to approach testing in a flexible way. By engaging a Roq test team across multiple testing phases, the client could leverage the knowledge of our previous experiences on similar Oracle implementations.

In planning the testing approach, the effective control and management of the following three key areas was seen as crucial to the successful delivery of the project:

Data and Data Migration

Data integrity was a key aspect of the solution, from both a testing and production perspective. As such, Roq focused heavily on the data, as detailed below:

• The data seeding of the various systems within the test environment(s) was achieved using a ‘cut’ of data extracted from production backups.

• Pre and post-validation of the migrated data was undertaken to ensure that data integrity was maintained and data synchronisation achieved between the up-stream and downstream test systems

Functional Testing

The solution has greater functional complexity and therefore needed a different approach to testing.

Initial activity focused on system testing of the new core user interface software. This was followed by testing the many interfaces to ensure error-free data flowing between the up and downstream systems.

Roq then focused on UAT, E2E and Regression testing before a round of Live Proving to demonstrate the quality of the following business processes:

• Merchandise – new product create/amend/manage/planning/pricing

• Insurance & Warranty – new product create/amend/manage/planning/pricing

Operational Acceptance Testing (OAT)

One of the technical roles Roq took ownership of was OAT. This was conducted primarily in support of the Non-functional Testing (NFT) phase and required extensive upfront interaction with various departments, business users, database analysts and developers.

As part of the OAT phase, we were also engaged to use Quick Test Professional in conjunction with Quality Centre during the design of the test scripts and subsequently used as the automated test tool of choice for script execution. In addition, The HP LoadRunner performance test tool was used throughout to validate system stability under load conditions.

Ultimately, the quality of the developed test design, test schedule, test scripts (and execution of the test scripts) was central to the successful completion and delivery of this test phase.

The Outcome  

• Roq’s experience of managing complex testing projects ensured that the correct resources and approach was used throughout the project

• Involving the business sponsors / users from the project outset ensured that all business scenarios were captured, developed and documented. This enabled us to define and build the appropriate test scripts, including relevant data requirements, in advance of testing commencing.

• The scenario-based test scripts were created with reusability in mind and would be used on post-project testing phases of System, UAT, E2E and Regression testing.

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