Digital has changed the way software is being developed, tested, released and maintained. It has changed our delivery models, our frameworks and architecture, and has increased the complexity of our applications. As the gap between performance and security is closing, non-functional requirements have increased as well. All of these have had an impact on the testing requirements of businesses. As the digital landscape evolves, testing teams need to become more agile and adapt to new trends like In-Sprint Automation, Containerized Testing, Test Intelligence Dashboards and more.
One of our clients, a global leader in the aviation space, with a presence across 60 countries, leverages the power of testing to improve efficiencies and enable an environment of innovation. One of their key focus areas is to provide a top-notch experience to their 100 million+ customers.
The Challenge
Since customer service is integral to the aviation sector, the client wanted to make sure errors were reduced, and continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) were run in the background. They wanted to tackle these major challenges:
- Longer testing times
- Prolonged release cycles
- Need of programmers for test automation
- Siloed non-functional testing
- Dependency on mobile devices
How we solved it
Our collaboration with the client began with understanding their current state, pain points, and the value proposition that the new solution should offer. We analyzed the gaps in the current testing environment by considering the following parameters:
- Current testing strategy – Adhoc testing and limited regression strategies
- Automation level – Challenges in test data preparation and lack of automation
- Count of applications undergoing performance testing – Less than 1% of applications
- Number of tools being used
We defined an application portfolio-level testing strategy, business metrics, key testing processes and policies and identified the problems and capabilities by leveraging proven methodologies, consisting of both inside-out and outside-in approaches.
We also created a Test Data Hub (TDH) for them to reduce the time taken in the testing process. There were about 400 plus applications being used and we ran thousands of test cases every day.
In case you are wondering what a TDH does – TDH has an array of bots on the back-end, which tap into the right data source, pull the apt data for you and give the results in an unified portal. Testers can then slice and dice the data. Errors are significantly reduced since the data is from the original source. This is GDPR compliant as well, and can create synthetic data as per the requirements.
Further, we helped them with the standardization and automation of test processes across the testing life cycle using different tools thereby enabling Continuous Integration (CI) by automated build installation on mobile devices.
Post these measures, we scheduled all the CI jobs to trigger on the right events. The automation results were maintained in a common repository that provided test intelligence dashboards.
The Impact
All these measures increased the pace of product releases. There was a 30% reduction in effort and cost through test automation and tool standardization.
We optimized testing time through the use of automation. As of now, the release cycle is 4-8 times a month, compared to once in a month prior to the engagement, which led to a 20% improvement in productivity. We have saved 22,000 hours of manual testing till date. These measures have improved quality and increased velocity, with tighter security and better performance.
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