ROQ Increases Speed of Delivery by 90% for UK’s Leading Pet Care Retailer

SUMMARY

The client is the UK’s largest pet supplies retailer, with more than 370 stores and 6,000 employees. The company sells products including food, toys, bedding, medication, accessories and pets. The company also works with 405 veterinary surgeons who practice from its stores.

CHALLENGE

For each new release of the client’s POS software, as well as testing new functionality, their test team ran a full regression test over a period of two weeks. This was a time-boxed exercise, meaning that they rarely achieved full test coverage, additionally their testers were often reassigned to other urgent tasks mid-regression testing, further reducing coverage. The test cases themselves were spreadsheet based and very high level, which meant that there was no consistency in testing between each release. As a result of this, bugs were found in production which should have been picked up in test, leading to a late defect turnaround; high defect costs and potential reputational damage.

SOLUTION

ROQ conducted a review of the client’s existing technical landscape, focusing on the clients four key areas: POS solution, integration platform (MS BizTalk), warehouse management and finance systems. As a priority, the Windows-based POS solution was chosen as the first application to automate.

A bespoke Java-based test automation framework was developed using open source tools including; Cucumber and Winium, which provided a behaviour-driven development (BDD) approach to test case scripting. The existing ambiguous test cases were re-written by ROQ and transformed into user stories and acceptance criteria in the form of Gherkin features and scenarios.

The framework was extended to support testing the application at a much lower level. Each test case that included a transaction would perform checks against the backend SQL database and ensure that transactions were sent to their JDA WMS & SAP Finance systems through the integration platform (MS BizTalk), thus extending the overall test coverage.

Test execution was controlled through Jenkins CI and distributed over several machines, dependent on the functionality being tested. Test results were then reported back to Jenkins CI and presented to the end user through a central reporting dashboard, which was customised as per the client’s business requirements.  This included database extracts, screenshots (taken at the point of failure) and detailed exception logs.

BENEFITS

The client was able to gain rapid feedback on any changes made on a critical system which the business relies heavily on to function. ROQ measures success by adding real business value and the result of this engagement was as follows;

• The automated solution reduced regression testing time by over 90%, giving a significant cost saving. The initial two-week cycle was cut down to approximately 7 hours.
• By dramatically increasing test coverage and adding consistency to the test process there was a significant reduction in defects entering production – improving end user satisfaction and reducing service desk call
• The solution ensured there was no need for test data maintenance, saving a great deal of time and money. This was achieved by adopting a data-driven approach, whereby data tables contained within feature files (tests) were dynamically populated at build-time with up-to-date test data from the underlying SQL database.
• As part of the implementation, ROQ added specific tests to test the customer facing vacuum fluorescent display (VFD), which had not previously been in scope for manual testing.

You can view the webinar we created on this recently here. 

If you would like to discuss how we might be able to help you in a similar context, please get in touch at ask@roq.co.uk