The client, McGraw-Hill, is a global financial, information and media services company that is also a “big three” educational publisher providing customized content, software, and services for pre-K through postgraduate education.
The client needed to transform from manual testing to automation by adding a process to their release phase. The client is mostly in the U.S., but this involved a small non-U.S. R&D center where we were half of the people there. There were in fact 2 separate projects. One focused more on the front-end that provides media lecturers with online capabilities to manage their courses, media and videos via the web, and the other is more focused on the back-end which provides the infrastructure for capture and lectures including data area integration such as course permissions, student/lecture interaction, etc. The combined effort would include validation testing, system testing, integration testing, end-to-end testing and mobile app testing.
Our team consisted of 21 manual testers and 2 automation (Selenium) specialists, in an agile environment with a DevOps Jenkins platform. The technologies included Amazon Web Services, DB migration, Jenkins, Python and FUNTASY (QualiTest’s internal framework for executing KDT workflows). FUNTASY is an automation tool for the QA tester that was developed by Qualitest; it was not used in conjunction with DevOps in this venture.
While working on the testing solution, word came from high up at the client that it would be desirable to switch over to DevOps. This was all being done in a more manual ad-hoc fashion prior to our involvement. DevOps is heavily based on an automation infrastructure, for builds, deployment, environment configuration, testing and reporting, and QualiTest happens to be very familiar with managing DevOps. Our effort began with tool selection for the many automated components, with a preference towards established and open-source.
We managed all of testing, providing end-to-end solutions for both projects. Once the components supporting the workflow were in place, work began on converting the manual test cases to automated ones. There are currently about 4,000 test cases currently in place, with about half a dozen being added or modified each day.
Over 4,000 automated test cases created
Managed the conversion process of automating many manual procedures
The addition of automation and the DevOps workflow greatly reduced SDLC time
