Client Overview

The client is a South African-based investment and holding company with business interests in Africa, Australia, and Eastern Europe. Its focus is primarily on the value market selling predominantly clothing, footwear, and textiles, based on a high volume/lower margin business model. The IT division delivers technology solutions to the entire business and increasingly needs the agile delivery of quality technology solutions to keep up with the vast growth in retail chains.

Problem statement

The client’s POS system is a key component of their retail technology landscape requiring regular testing of all changes and enhancements. The manual regression testing of existing functionality has become increasingly drawn out and took nearly 34 hours to complete.

This lengthy process limited the client to only three POS updates per year and hampered the adoption of a more agile delivery approach by the IT division.

The existing functionality of the client POS comprised approximately 3, 000 test cases. Manual regression testing was no longer feasible and needed to be replaced by test automation.

Test automation of POS systems is challenging as it doesn’t have an object model that conventional test automation tools can interact with, making conventional tools like Selenium unsuitable.

Solution

During the Discovery Phase of the project, Sikuli was selected as the most appropriate test tool as it utilises image recognition to identify and control GUI components. An automation readiness assessment was also performed, and the full scope of automation was agreed upon.

Inspired Testing’s expert test automation delivered the creation and scripting of an automation backlog containing key test cases as prioritised by the client, and the creation of an automated regression pack to execute with every release.

Before improvement

The manual testing time to complete all modules totalled 33 hours and 43 minutes.

After improvement

The automation testing time was reduced by 91% to 2 hours and 52 minutes, a time saving of 30 hours and 51 minutes. Multiple tests can be conducted in a day and confidence in deployed software is improved.

Benefit to the client after implementation

The client gained a cost saving per test cycle for twenty modules of R 6, 562 based on current Intermediate Test Analyst hourly rates. The test automation solution is critical in enabling more frequent POS releases in future. The solution can be used not only to test the correctness of the software but also the underlying configuration data.

The shortened time to conclude testing frees up the team to conduct other testing and/or value-added tasks. Accuracy is improved since repetitive action fatigue is reduced, and false negative/positive results due to user error are eliminated.

Data can be sourced directly from the database and preconfigured data, eliminating the preparation impact on multiple teams.

Test findings reports are generated automatically and are more user-friendly and supported by screenshots and video recordings for easy reference.

Overall, the solution has led to improved team morale due to the minimisation of repetitive testing, reduced workload, and rapid turnaround on test outcomes, which allows for faster response times to fix defects.

Following this engagement, the Inspired Academy provided tailored test automation training to the team, equipping them with skills in C# and Sikuli.