Situation – A Production Bottleneck
The pressure was mounting on the IT team behind one of the country’s largest big-box retailers. The company faced rising costs from stricter labor laws, investments in new business initiatives and mandatory software updates from their vendor.
The company’s leadership identified a pressure relief valve: increasing the pace and efficiency of their workforce management software deployments. This would allow them to implement compliance, new features, and process changes while driving down costs quickly.
At the time, a deployment took a full quarter to complete. It was primarily dragged down by a 6 to 8-week manual Quality Assurance (QA) testing phase. So the organization set out to automate their QA testing and increase the quality and frequency of releases.
The organization tasked a 20-person QA team with developing 1,500 automated tests.
Problem – A Massive Setback
After a year and $2.9 million spent in development, the automated tests were complete. And the testing phase was reduced from several weeks to just 36 hours.
But there was a problem. A big problem.
The automated test failed to complete successfully 75% of the time. It took so long to correct those errors that any efficiency gains were wiped out. The company effectively had an automated testing framework that didn’t function correctly without extensive manual effort.
The issues stemmed from the complexity of the test automation framework and the supporting infrastructure, making it prone to breaking and expensive to maintain.
And to top it, the automated test cases always seemed to be out of date as the result of rapidly changing business requirements.
Solution – Taking Control with TestAssure
Frustrated with the results of their test automation framework, the company decided to work with TestAssure and leverage our automated testing platform and service.
Our pre-built automation library provides highly effective and accurate testing. The required 1,500 test cases, which initially took 1-year and $2.9 million to create, were re-created in just over a month.
Each test now took 3-seconds to run.
Our platform now also serves as a proactive notification system that alerts the organization of even the most subtle changes in system behavior.
And not only did the organization regain their faith in automation, but they also realized results that far exceeded their expectations.
Outcomes – Performance, Productivity, and Profit
Today, the retailer has fully replaced its homegrown solution with TestAssure, vastly improving and accelerating the testing process while reducing errors.
Creating a single automated test case used to take days to implement. Now it takes less than 15 minutes – that’s over a 90% increase in productivity.
The retailer now has over 35,000 tests in their regression library and runs them over 150,000 times before each bi-weekly production release.
With the QA cycle taking a single day to complete, the company has also been able to increase product releases from 4 to more than 26 a year.
The more frequent deployments have allowed the business to stay in compliance, deploy new features, and process changes while rapidly driving down costs.
This increased efficiency has also allowed their team to better focus on solving higher priority problems and more proactively addressing the needs of the business.
The once-struggling project has finally realized its full potential. And automated testing is now helping the company rapidly innovate and transform its business with confidence.
“TestAssure helped us reduce our costs significantly and pull forward the timelines of our Workforce Management roll-out, without sacrificing the quality of the solution.” — Product Manager Fortune 20 Retailer