Global Sporting Goods Brand Automates Platform Testing for Superior Agility

Client overview 

The Client is one of the world’s leading sporting goods brands. With circa $22 billion global turnover, it manufactures and sells apparel, accessories, and footwear for professional athletes. It also designs, develops, produces, and markets to consumers online and in over 2,000 stores: clothing, shoes, equipment, mobile accessories, watches, eyewear, bags, baseball caps, and socks, as well as branded male- and female deodorants, perfumes, aftershave, and lotions. 

“The goal is to establish a weekly release model, which contains the necessary changes to support business transformation and is quality assured.”

Elite sports brand demands systems agility 

To manage its ERP and SCM, the Client has a global SAP platform. However, the business had only been able to deploy large-scale changes on this platform approximately once every three months, which was much less frequently than desired.  

All testing had been manual, with test cases written in MS Word or Excel. Not being regularly maintained, many were out of date with expired functionality or missing steps. The data preparation required was taking significant time and relied upon the variable knowledge of business users pulled into testing. Logging of test results and tracking progress was also manual with variable level of detail provided from tester to tester.  

To cover the high-test volume, it was necessary to involve more than 600 people in testing. With more than 4,200 manual test cases for ERP and a further 1,000 for SCM, large test burdens and associated limitations were inhibiting the business’s agility. It meant only small changes were possible within a more frequent weekly or monthly cadence. But even these smaller releases had issues, typically comprised of localized testing with lower levels of quality assurance and higher levels of risk.  

Test regime overhaul for sports icon

The Client wanted to kick-off a root-and-branch test overhaul initiative with Qualitest, aiming to: 

• Reduce total number of manual test cases by 30%. 
• Ensure no coverage gaps were created or existed in the old assets. 
• Automate 60% of test cases. 
• Enable weekly test execution. 
• Provide results within 4hrs at business and technical level.

“The optimization process not only reduced the number of manual tests needed, but identified many major gaps, which were exposing us to high business risk.”

Qualitest created a comprehensive test strategy to achieve these goals, which covered business process, business risk and impact analysis across the existing functionality. We then began testing phase in order to: 

• Map and optimize test coverage. 
• Rebuild manual test cases. 
• Build automated test cases.
• Provide a managed service to execute, report and maintain test assets. 

Key benefits 

As a result of implementing this comprehensive test strategy, the Client observed:

• 5,200 manual test case burden reduced by 64%. 
• From purely manual testing to 63% automation coverage. 
• Previous three-month test cycle now runs in <4hrs. 
• Future proofed testing with automation-enhanced speed and flexibility.