Why test automation services?
When it comes to e-commerce, we all know that customer experience is king. Swift development and error-free deployments are essential. For many retailers, the growing complexity of the applications and architecture required to create best-in-class experiences necessitates test automation. Manual testing often means slower development cycles and longer employee hours — as well as rising costs. All these were challenges one of our clients faced until it turned to Tricentis Tosca and iSoftStone’s testing services.
After engaging iSoftStone, the company soon experienced dramatic improvements in speed and efficiency. Here’s how.
The right test automation tool and the right enterprise testing services
Our client, a leading furniture retailer, had launched a revamped e-commerce site built on SAP Commerce Cloud (formerly known as SAP Hybris). However, its team was still manually testing the whole application, including new components, on the front end.
A growing business appetite for new user stories, components, and features led to an ever-increasing scope of execution. Manual testing was soon a bottleneck in the development pipeline.
The client’s team needed an automation tool to accelerate testing without compromising on quality. They identified Tricentis Tosca for its end-to-end capabilities, codeless model-based approach, and ability to integrate with every part of the DevOps toolchain. To help them configure and run the test automations in alignment with the company’s business model, they leveraged a long-standing and trusted partnership with iSoftStone and engaged our testing services team.
Our team of certified Tricentis Tosca experts got to work on automating 140 test cases and within weeks our client was seeing the benefits.
Immediate and profound improvements with test automation
We were able to fully automate 90% of all business-critical smoke and sanity tests for our client and 50%+ of system integration tests (SIT). What took hours — or even days — of engineering time can now be completed in just minutes with issues reported and resolved the same day.
- Smoke tests decreased from 8 hours to 45 minutes.
- Sanity tests reduced from 2 hours to 10 minutes.
- SITs cut from 80 hours to just 4 hours.
The impressive capabilities of Tricentis Tosca aside, what else contributed to that impressive 90-95% faster execution time? Experienced automation architects and engineers who could quickly step in and resolve blockers and issues.
Says Santhosh Panguluri, one of iSoftStone’s delivery directors, “When it comes to understanding multiple components and integration risks, that’s where expertise is needed and where our clients benefit most. It’s about how it all works end to end. Our automation engineers ensure components are tested independently and as well as the integrations.”
Now stable automations are in place bugs are identified in the early stages of a build and defect leakage is reduced. Both Agile and DevOps workflows can be supported and multiple same-day deployments are possible. Development is accelerated and streamlined. For example, if a deployment is run at 9:00 am, automated testing scripts can be run and issues reported within as little as 30 minutes and resolved by noon.
For every build deployment, we can run the scripts, identify if there are any app issues, and report it quickly.
Santhosh Panguluri
Delivery Director | iSoftStone
Embracing AI-powered automation
The journey doesn’t end here. Our client is keen to explore everything Tricentis Tosca has to offer. We’re currently helping them run a proof of concept for its distributed execution feature which allows tests to be executed across multiple machines simultaneously and will improve efficiency and scalability even further.
And while our client has yet to implement Tricentis Tosca’s AI-powered capabilities, plans are in place. This includes implementing the Vision AI feature. Built on convolutional neural networks, it can “see” elements, build a test from a simple mockup, and even perform self-healing tests.
In short, 95% faster is just the beginning.
Our client won’t be traveling alone. Gartner forecasts that by 2027 80% of enterprises will have integrated AI-augmented testing tools into their software engineering toolchain. That’s faster development, higher productivity in testing, fewer mistakes, and reduced costs.
Any retail enterprise looking for a competitive edge will embrace automation, especially AI-powered automation. With our 12+ years of retail experience and enterprise testing services experts with expertise across multiple platforms and tools, iSoftStone is ready to assist.
