Performance Engineered for Retail Giant

The Client 

The Client is one of the world’s largest retail pharmacy and health and beauty businesses, with both a strong high street and online offering in a number of territories. The scale of this organisation and differing pace, timeframes, and methods of delivery across projects makes theirs a complex IT environment. 

The Client felt that their large (primarily offshore-based) testing partner needed support for their aspirations to move to a DevOps supported by an iterative/Agile way of working. In addition, they wanted to introduce a robust independent challenge to enable earlier detection of performance-related issues, which were costly to the client and slowed their plans to fully digitise their business. 

Roq’s Solution  

The Client recognised that as a specialist  UK-based testing and Quality Engineering provider Roq had the required ability and expertise to engineer quality (specifically performance) into projects at the earliest opportunity, thus reducing the time and costs on a number of projects. 

Roq provided a Quality Engineering Performance Architect, who designed and implemented an efficient ’shift-left’ strategy, which took into account risk associated with the Client’s non-functional areas. Roq subsequently provide a team of Performance Test Engineers who provided test planning and execution on a number of projects ranging from those using traditional waterfall methodologies to fully agile implementations. 

The Outcome  

Roq introduced a clearly defined approach to both Performance Engineering and the broader Non-Functional Testing, which took into account the risks and potential bottlenecks. 

• They also facilitated key components being performant at the earliest opportunity 

• Potential of failures and rework at the back end of the SDLC were avoided. 

• They also co-ordinated improvements to the development of the Non-functional Requirements thus enabling effective and efficient performance testing 

• This all underpinned the Client’s move from their previous Waterfall to a DevOps methodology with Agile working practices. 

After Roq established the strategy, the client was keen that Roq’s Quality Engineering Architect proved the principles of the performance engineering approach on a new project, embedding best practice from the start. Roq also became aware of a number of performance-related issues that existed on some existing projects, and the Client asked that the Roq team also get involved in those to help resolve these issues. 

Roq provided technical insight, including strong challenges early in the project lifecycle whilst collaborating closely with the Client’s Business Analysis and Development teams. 

• The Roq team was able to solve some performance issues that had been affecting the Client’s customer-facing website for more than 5 years 

• The resultant performance improvements facilitated the Client being able to  maximise sales through their customer-facing site, especially during peak periods; and 

• As issues were fixed, the Client was able to reduce their time, effort and cost spent on mitigating the poor performance and were able to free up some of their resources to work on other projects, which they hadn’t been able to achieve previously. 

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