Roq Increases Quality of Customer-facing Applications for Multi-national Sports Retailer

The Client 

The client is a sports and outdoor fashion retail company, with stores throughout the UK. The group has over 2,400 stores globally spread across several fashion brands and is now firmly established in the UK, mainland Europe and Asia.

Roq was approached by the client to review their existing test automation framework which had been delivered by a third-party supplier, to provide assurance that the solution delivered was fit for purpose. Following this review, Roq raised several concerns regarding the suitability and effectiveness of the framework and proposed an alternative solution more in line with the Clients‘ testing and organisational needs.

Roq’s Solution

Roq conducted a full review of the Clients’ critical regression test pack and found that there were significant issues with many of the test cases e.g. several didn’t reflect current system behaviour, several assumed a detailed level of domain knowledge, several lacked suitable test assertions, and others contained hard-coded and out-of-date test data. As a result of these findings, Roq assisted with re-writing these test cases in order that they were suitable for test automation.

Roq then delivered a test automation framework which provides the capability to functionally test both native and web-based applications accessed via Android and iOS devices. The framework was developed using C#, to align with the in-house development skill-set of the Client and to avoid licensing costs, it was created using only open source tools including Selenium WebDriver, Appium and NUnit. . The best practice Page Object design pattern was followed to support high re-use and maintainability. Test execution was managed using Jenkins CI hosted on AWS, and the results of these tests were automatically uploaded to the Client’s test case management tool (TestRail).

During the delivery process, Roq also trained some of the Client’s employees on how to manage and maintain the test automation framework and assisted the Client in hiring an additional resource to further augment their own test automation capability by reviewing CVs and participating in their interview and selection process.

The Outcome  

Roq’s solution was well received by the Client, as it delivered significant benefits such as: 

• Significant time and cost saving, as a result of Roq automating all of  the critical regression test pack, and drastically reducing the  test execution time to 3 hours through the use of parallel execution across multiple mobile devices

• Increased software quality by highlighting inconsistencies between the Android and iOS applications, which led to improvements to the “automatability” of the applications in future, and ultimately the quality of the code delivered 

• The flexibility and usability of the solution delivered a real return on investment for the Client, as the framework was created with extensibility in mind – after initially automating a single brand/fascia, the same framework can be applied to the remaining eleven brands across each of the Client’s native and web applications. 

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