Roq delivers Test Automation for global broadcasting organisation

The Client 

The Client is an innovative market leader in the television broadcasting industry, with customers including global broadcasters, tele-production facilities, service providers and independent video professionals.

The Client develops and produces technology and services for live video production, news and play out by providing glass (camera) to glass (television) solutions. They deliver end-to-end television production and content distribution workflows that enable the efficiency and flexibility that broadcasters need to stay ahead of the competition.

The Client has been developing a cloud-based media workflow solution and, to support the development and ongoing maintenance of this product, approached Roq to design and implement an automated test framework.

The test automation framework had to fulfil two main objectives.  Firstly, it had to check that the existing product was not impacted by new functionality introduced (Regression Testing), and that new features/enhancements met the end user requirements, with both functional and non-functional testing taken into consideration.

Roq’s Solution

Roq delivered a test automation framework used for testing over 70% of the functional areas provided through the cloud-based workflow solution, with tests ranging from creating brand new television channels all the way through to managing “Breaking News” updates.

There were several key challenges that needed to be overcome. As with any media management tool the product is highly dynamic, with constantly changing values (queued items in a playlist, timestamps/durations etc.), and this posed a problem in how to ensure the tests executed reliably. Roq implemented a robust exception management policy which enabled the tests to be consistent, and the results reliable i.e. they provided an accurate picture of the state of an environment at any given time.

Roq’s responsibilities ranged from selecting the core technologies that underpin the foundation of the solution, to implementing an end-to-end automation framework, (including integrating with the clients’ existing test case management system), to source code control and delivering a reporting suite to provide immediate feedback on the health of the product in a continuous integration environment.

By choosing open-source tools (Selenium WebDriver, NUnit, etc) to achieve the goal set by the Client, which took into account the Client’s existing/preferred technology choices (having ‘in-house‘ C# developers/TFS source control tool), Roq also helped the client keep costs to a minimum and executed a hand over of the framework to the Client so that it could easily be maintained by them going forward.

Roq also provided support in terms of future development of the test framework by providing advice on best practises (using the “Page Object Model” approach), on how to structure tests, and passing on “lessons learnt” from this and other projects.

The Outcome  

Through engaging Roq in the development of the test automation framework, the Client immediately benefitted from the wealth of experience Roq’s automation consultants have. Roq was able to source the most appropriate tools for to meet the Client’s situation i.e. taking into consideration the Client’s existing and preferred tools and skillsets, and they delivered an end-to-end test automation framework far faster than the Client would have been able to if this was done in-house. All of the work was performed by Roq remotely from their Test Lab in Chorley which helped minimise the costs to the Client.

The test automation framework was designed to complement the Client’s new Agile way of working, by exposing functionality to the Client’s development team to integrate with the tools they use. This facilitates changes being tested at an early stage, to prove that the system acted as expected, and that existing features continued to function as before. By catching defects early this considerably reduced the amount of rework required, which enabled the Client’s team to focus on enhancing the solution by implementing new features and refining the end user experience, without the worry of having to execute a whole Regression suite manually.

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