Client overview

The Client is a famous high-end fashion and lifestyle retailer whose iconic brands are household names around the world. Long sold through an extensive chain of physical stores, more recently the Client began selling its products through a network of ecommerce websites, which required continual updating with new features, functions, special offers and merchandise.

Aiming high: Higher velocity, higher quality, better governance

The Client’s testing programs and practices were unable to keep up with the stepped-up pace of change and other demands of digital delivery. They were heavily dependent on manual regression testing, resulting in a prolonged testing cycle. In addition, misalignment across Development, Integration, Conversion and other teams was producing an uncoordinated, inefficient structure not conducive to collaboration. To maintain their competitive advantage, the Client needed to speed up the release cycle with no quality compromise.

Automation first for improvements that last

Qualitest implemented an automation-first approach to provide strategic value through velocity improvement, quality optimization and process maturity.

I. Velocity Improvement

Immediately upon engagement, our teams started redefining the testing processes and brought in enterprise domain experts to help gauge the processes and standards. We discovered it was taking more than 30k tests to identify only 4% of defects.

Our teams restructured the whole testing cycle, implementing the targeted testing concept and automation-first methods. This helped the Client to be prepared to test the deployments and upgrades and keep up with marketing changes by testing in time.

For the business processes, we leveraged our partnership with Tricentis to achieve optimal use of tools such as TOSCA, accelerating software delivery by drastically reducing test cycle times. We took a scriptless approach, enabling higher test automation rates with significantly reduced maintenance effort.

II. Quality Optimization

Qualitest also helped identify the core objectives that needed to be automated and run the core processes biweekly to ensure quality and defect-free go-lives. We achieved this by automating 25% of the test coverage and developing run-ready CI/CD pipelines with a quality assurance gating process.

To bridge the gap between teams from Asia and North America, Qualitest brought in SAP-certified resources in Asia-specific regions who would work in line with global teams and provide regular updates and deliverables, keeping the Dev and QA teams aligned.

III. Process Maturity 

Leveraging TOSCA, the Qualitest automation team developed 283 business flows for modules such as supply chain and wholesale, which have substantial positive impact on SAP QA process. TOSCA’s TDS (Test Data Service) feature, used to manage test data in distributed environments, enabled us to store dynamic test data in a shared location, making it easy for test cases to read/update. Our teams also implemented AI tools for auto-healing to lower automation maintenance.

Key benefits

Qualitest, using state-of-the art automated testing tools from strategic partner Tricentis, helped the Client achieve immediate improvements in release time and accuracy as well as ensure continued value in steady state.

  • Automation-first strategy increased test cycle velocity x 2.
  • By reducing test cases more than 50%, we achieved significant cost savings.
  • There have been zero critical incidents post go-live, attesting to improved quality. 
  • Ratio of functional to automation resources on POD teams is now 1:2.
  • Enabled metrics-driven delivery and installed a unified dynamic metrics reporting dashboard.
quality engineering free assessment Download the PDF