When one of the country’s largest big-box companies set out to build their own automation framework to test their complex retail workforce management solution, expectations for greater release efficiency, improved performance, and overall cost-effectiveness were high. Driven by ever-changing labor laws, new business initiatives, and mandatory updates from their software vendor, the business needed a better, faster, cheaper way to test production deployments.
Updating production every quarter, automating the WFM testing process was viewed as a way to cut their 6-8 week QA cycle to just a few days, thereby enabling the business to increase the frequency and quality of their production releases. But after dedicating a 20-person QA team to build 1,500 automated tests that took over a year and $2.9M to develop, their automated regression test bed would take over 36 hours to finish and result in over 75% of the tests failing to complete.
This resulted in a large manual QA effort with every release and did not improve release efficiency, performance, or overall cost-effectiveness. Even though the company’s frustration with automation was clear, the solution was not.
The automation framework and supporting infrastructure was technically complex and would often break, resulting in an unreliable architecture that was very costly to maintain. The actual test bed was constantly outdated as business requirement changes outpaced the teams’ ability to refactor the automation’s code. Implications across the business were widespread and the company’s faith in automation was wearing thin.
Ready to transform their failed DIY testing framework, the retail giant turned to TestAssure to deliver a new approach: automated WFM testing software.
TestAssure was quickly adopted by the business and used to deliver highly effective testing scenarios using the TestAssure library of pre-built automations. Since no coding was needed to write tests, key stakeholders across the business were able to recreate the company’s 1,500 test cases that originally took a year to build in just over a month.
Best of all, since the TestAssure performance was lightning fast, taking only 2 seconds to run a test, the TestAssure service continually ran like a workhorse in the background.
TestAssure now serves as a proactive notification system that alerts the business about even the most subtle changes in system behavior. The company not only regained their faith in automation but also began realizing results that exceeded their expectations.
“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
Today, the industry-leading retailer’s investment in its homegrown automated testing has been fully replaced by the TestAssure automated WFM testing software, resulting in a vastly improved testing approach and an overall acceleration of delivery with a reduction in production defects.
Creating a single automated test case used to require multiple resources and take days to implement but now takes less than 15 minutes — a 99% increase in productivity. As a result, the company went from automating 1,500 tests to over 18,000 — increasing its output by 1100% and reducing defects by 88%.
By shrinking the company’s 6-8 week QA cycle to just 1 day, the business was able to accelerate the number of production releases from 4 per year to over 26 releases per year. This allowed the business to accelerate the timeline of key features and rollouts to additional markets.
Their new testing software empowered the team to be significantly more agile and respond more proactively to the needs of the business and key stakeholders. And, with a 96% reduction in monthly run costs, and accelerated business initiatives, it was obvious that their partnership with TestAssure was a tremendous success.
Ready to learn how automated WFM testing from TestAssure can benefit your organization? Contact our team today through the form below.